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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 









THE 

PUBLIC SQUARE 













/ 

THE 

PUBLIC SQUARE 


BY 

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT 

AUTHOR OF “ROUTLEDGE RIDES ALONE,” ETC. 



D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

NEW YORK :: :: MCMXXIII 



COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY 

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT 


J 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

APR 18 "23 

©C1AG9S996 


TO 

DOROTHY MOSHER 







CONTENTS 


CHAPTER y AGE 


I. 

54 Harrow Street 



i 

II. 

The Colored Man 



IO 

III. 

A Fish Omelet 



17 

IV. 

Lambill Knocks . 



23 

V. 

Luncheon at Sharpe’s . 



3 i 

VI. 

Enter, Fanny Gallup 



36 

VII. 

“The Freedom of Ignorance” 


47 

VIII. 

Somebody’s Shoulder 



52 

IX. 

“You Both Have Keys” . 



61 

X. 

April Breathes Again . 



69 

XI. 

The Baby Carriage . 



75 

XII. 

Under the Same Lamp . 



81 

XIII. 

“Mother” . . 



87 

XIV. 

Isolation. 



93 

XV. 

The Cobden Interior . 



99 

XVI. 

Dicky Feels a Slump 



109 

XVII. 

New Lodgers for Harrow Street 

113 

XVIII. 

An Outer Change 



118 

XIX. 

Fanny Dries Her Tears . 



120 

XX. 

They Walk in Circles . 



124 

XXI. 

The Dinner Coat . 



129 






CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XXII. A Letter from Pidge . . . . 136 

XXIII. The Red Room . . . £ . s . 143 

XXIV. Miss Claes Speaks . . . . 149 

XXV. “Be It Ever So Humble” . . 154 

XXVI. The Hanging Sock .... 161 

XXVII. The Mahatma and the Miracle 167 
XXVIII. The Rack of Sex ..... 175 

XXIX. Rufus’ Play Day.180 

XXX. The Head of the House . ., . 190 

XXXI. Two Letters from India . . . 194 

XXXII. France, 1918. The Yank . . 197 

XXXIII. Paris, 1918—Haddon and Ames 202 

XXXIV. The House of Ducier . . . 207 

XXXV. Fanny Hears the Drum . . . 214 

XXXVI. Rufe Hurries Home . . :#1 218 

XXXVII. John Higgins’ Code . . t ., 219 

XXXVIII. An Office of the World ., ... 225 

XXXIX. Seven Flawless Days . . . 229 

XL. The Yank Developed . . . 239 

XLI. Under the Mangoes of Cawnpore 246 
XLII. Lala Relu Ram . . . . . 249 

XLIII. Hathis Laments . . . . . 257 

XLIV. The Slate and the Sponge . . 263 

XLV. Amritsar, April 13, 1919 . . . 268 

XLVI. The Hooked Man.277 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

XLVII. In the Warm Dark .... 281 

XLVIII. “India’s Messenger” . .. . ,. 288 

XLIX. Pidge Tries Gramercy Park . . 292 

L. Dicky’s Idea Works .... 298 

LI. “We Look Upon Women as 


Sacred”.302 

LII. The Old Face.309 


LIII. The White Light Again . . . 315 






THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


I 


54 HARROW STREET 



GIRL of nineteen had just arrived in New 


York, with one fat bag. She turned into the 


A curving silence of Harrow Street, which is 
only three minutes' walk from Washington Square, 
but some trick to find. Several times she changed 
her bag from one hand to the other, sometimes putting 
it down and stepping around it, until she came to a 
door with a room-to-rent sign. This house was painted 
fresh green, the only thing that distinguished it from 
all the other houses of the block, except the number, 
which was Fifty-four. 

“Here goes me!” she said, starting up the stone 
steps. 

She rang. The door before her didn’t open, but 
the basement door below did. A woman’s voice called, 
“Yes?” in rising inflection. 

The girl trailed her bag down to the walk and around 
the railing to the lower entrance where a dark-faced 
woman stood, regarding her with almost concerned 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


attention—dark eyes that saw too much, the girl de¬ 
cided. The face was un-American, but its foreign 
suggestion was vague. It might even have been East 
Indian. If her skin was natively white, it had certainly 
known the darkening of much sunlight. As the girl 
drew near she sensed a curious freshness from the 
woman; something hard to name, having to do with 
the garments as well as the shadowy olive skin. 

“I want to rent a room—a small back room. I saw 
your sign on the door.” 

“I have a room, but it hasn’t much air,” the woman 
said. 

“I don’t need much air-” 

“Come and we’ll look. It is on the upper floor, 
but it is not quite back. Leave your bag here in the 
hall.” 

It was eleven in the morning, but the smell of coffee 
was in the dark basement corridor, and laughing voices 
were heard behind the shut door to the right. A man’s 
voice said in a stimulated tone: 

“Believe me, and I’ve been around, Miss Claes is 
the deepest-dyed sport I’ve ever met. You could drag 
her the length of Harrow Street and she’d come up 
fresh from the laundry-” 

“That reminds me, I’m going to start a laundry,” 
a woman’s voice announced. 

“I’m going to start something myself-” came 

another voice. 

The girl, following through the corridor, heard a 
little breathless sort of chuckle from the woman ahead 


2 





54 HARROW STREET 


of her on the dark stairs. The place smelled like a 
shut room when it rains—a cigaretty admixture. 

They climbed. The next hall was spooky with gas¬ 
light; the next was gay with frying sausages. They 
climbed. The next was the one, and it smelled of 
paint—the same green paint as on the outside of the 
house—on one of the doors and doorframes, but the 
wood was plainly charred under the paint. 

“We had a fire, but we put it out with wash water 
before the engines got here, soapy water.” 

The girl had a picture of threshing soap about in 
pails of water before applying it to the flames. 

“This is the one,” the woman said, unlocking the 
next to last room from the back on the left. “All the 
rest are filled just now. Most of my lodgers never 
leave, only as they strike it rich-” 

“Do they often strike it rich?” 

“Oh, yes, dear. New York is quite the most magic 
place in America—something for every one who comes, 
if he only stays on.” 

They had crowded into the little room. 

“This is fine,” the girl said. “This is what I want. 
It’s just as I saw it.” 

“You get your water in the hall below,” the woman 
explained. “There is no gas plate, so you will have 
to bring your coffeepot down to my stove in the base¬ 
ment. The walls are ugly, but I’ll see that the cot is 
clean for you. If the wall of the next house across 
the area were only painted white, you would get more 
light.” 


3 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


The wall spoken of was less than three feet from 
the window sill. 

“What is the price?” the girl asked, with a cough 
before and after. 

“Twelve dollars a month.” 

“I will pay for a month now,” she said, with a small 
part of a big out-breath. 

“When did you come to New York?” the woman 
asked. 

“This morning.” 

“First time?” 

“Yes. From Los Angeles.” 

“And you have had four nights on the train?” 

“Six. It was a slow tourist train. I sat up from 
Chicago-” 

“Have you lived in Los Angeles long?” 

“Always—in and around.” 

“We don’t dare to think of Los Angeles much. To 
a lot of us here in New York, it’s a kind of heaven. 
Southern California—the sea and the mountains and 
the ten months of sunlight and the cool morning fogs 
and the ripe figs-” 

“I’ve wanted New York like that,” the girl said. 
“I’ve wanted New York so badly that I was afraid 
on the train that it wouldn’t stay until I got here-” 

“That’s the way to come,” the landlady said. “New 
York would wait for you. Oh, yes, New York waits 
for your kind. What are you going to do here?” 

“Write.” 

“Really?” 


4 







5 4 HARROW STREET 


The woman sat down on the edge of the cot. Her 
interest did not seem an affectation. Her figure was 
thin but lithe. One wouldn’t know in these shadows 
if she were nearer twenty-five or thirty-five. She 
semed altogether without haste, smiling easily, but 
slow to laugh aloud. Her eyes looked startlingly 
knowing as she lit a cigarette—not natural somehow. 
At the same time in the matchlight her face had looked 
tired and weathered. Her way of speaking was like 
an English person, or one educated in England. 

“Do you mean stories?” she asked. 

“Yes, a book, a long story—set in eighteenth-century 
France.” 

“But you seem so young.” 

“I have written for a long time—always written.” 

“How old are you, please?” 

“Nineteen — but I have lived in a writing house 
always.” 

“Where is your house? I have been to Los An¬ 
geles.” 

“Back in a canyon near Santa Monica and my father 
is there now—in his slippers. He teaches every one 

how to write-” There was something baleful in 

the girl’s blue eyes, or perhaps it was exhaustion, as 
she smiled. 

“Does he write stories?” 

“No, metaphysics, but he knows everything-” 

“What is your name?” 

“Musser—Pidge Musser. Not Pidge, really. Pan- 

5 






THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


dora is my name, but every one calls me Pidge. My 
father started it.” 

“Is his name Adolph Musser?” 

In the dimness, the girl’s face looked like a blur of 
white; a little stretched, too, it appeared just now. 

“Yes, that’s his name,” she said in a hopeless tone. 
“So you know him, too?” 

“I heard him lecture once.” 

“I suppose you ‘fell for’ him? They all do.” 

The woman’s black eyes twinkled. “The lecture was 
on cosmic consciousness,” she said. “I remember dis¬ 
tinctly that Mr. Musser outlined four paths of ap¬ 
proach.” 

“Yes, the mystical, the occult, the mathematical, and 
the artistic. Did he talk in bare feet?” 

“Yes, and an Eastern robe.” 

“That was a camel driver’s robe,” said the girl. 
“Oh, I didn’t think I’d hear of him here.” 

“You won’t. May I call you Pidge?” 

“Yes, what you like. My father names everything.” 

“It sounds better than Pandora—at least, to me. . . . 
I must go down now. A little breakfast party is wait¬ 
ing there. Take off your things. I’ll come back soon. 
I am Miss Claes and I want to come back already.” 

Pidge Musser sat almost in the center of her room, 
but not quite. At least, she sat in the center of the 
stiff little cot. She could touch two of the walls. The 
third was across the narrow aisle from the cot. The 
fourth was the windowed one, which looked as if it 
6 




54 HARROW STREET 


were about to be bricked up entirely. That was quite 
a distance. 

Her room. She was alone. She looked at the door, 
arose, brought in the key and turned it from the inside. 
Alone, and this was New York. She could live a month 
anyway, and write and write on The Lance of the 
Rivernais. She could be herself and not be told how 
to live and love and write and bathe and breathe, and 
change her polarity and promote her spirit and govern 
her temper and appetites, by a man who was governed 
by anything but himself. 

New York. She had hardly dared to look at it on 
the way from the train to Washington Square, where 
the street car had put her down. She had come to 
Washington Square because one of the boys who 
studied with her father had said it was the best place 
to live in all the big town—the cheapest and friend¬ 
liest and quietest. ... It appeared all true, but Miss 
Claes wasn’t like a rooming-house landlady; quite 
different, in fact, and astonishing. 

“I could hear her talk about New York, forever,” 
Pidge said half aloud, and this was a remark of con¬ 
siderable force from one who had known the maiming 
of many words. 

Presently she would go out and look at New York 
again; walk about a bit, keeping a mental string tied 
to this green house. Besides she had to rent a type¬ 
writer, but there was no rush. It was delicious sitting 
here alone in the gloom of midday, making the place 
her own, locked in—a chance at last to take a look at 

7 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


herself and see what she was made of and think of 
what she was here for. 

There was a mirror. It wasn't cracked, according 
to tradition, but its surface had frozen over in a high 
wind. Everything waved, eternally waved. It gave 
the sense of air in the room, and made one look mended. 
Pidge hoped she would never shed tears in that mirror. 
Once she had caught herself weeping, and she looked 
so abysmal that she was almost frightened out of the 

habit. With these waves added- Pidge took off 

her hat and flipped it over on the cot. Her head didn’t 
look natural, but that wasn’t all the mirror’s fault. One 
of the things she had wanted to do for months was to 
make her hair a shade redder than it was. Of course, 
she hadn’t dared at home, and she couldn’t manage it 
on the train, but there had been six hours to wait in 
Chicago and a small hotel room that frightened her yet. 
She had emerged from that room a different shade, so 
Chicago meant henna and rain and a frightful hotel. 
It would always be so. She had been against landing 
in New York one color and then changing. She had 
wanted to start life new in New York and keep it 
straight, an absolutely new page, a new book. 

Her reddened hair waved. It made her face look 
whiter, and brought out a red tint to her wool dress that 
had been brown as apple butter before. 

Everything about her was tired. If she took off her 
new shoes she was afraid she would never get them on 
again to-day, and she had to think of renting that 
typewriter. A little later, she sat up straight, because 
8 




54 HARROW STREET 


through the wall from the next room back came the 
buzz of a machine. She listened with a thrill. It 
stopped and went on—unequal stops and buzzes of 
rapid typing for several minutes; then a long sustained 
buzz, until a sheet was changed. No commercial type¬ 
writing. That was “creative” stuff, as her father would 
say—a word she had vowed never to use. At least, 
some one in there was doing a letter. 

All this was before noon on an October day in the 
good year of 1913, before anything ever happened to 
anybody. 




II 


THE COLORED MAN 


Once there was an old sculptor who had apprentices. 
Townsfolk were invited on a certain day to look at the 
work of the young men. One of the apprentices was 
greatly worried by the faulty light of the shop in 
which his exhibit was placed. He complained about 
it to his master, who is said to have answered in these 
terms: “Never mind, son, about the light here. It is 
the light of the public square that tells the story.” 

T AICHARD COBDEN was twenty-one in 1910, 
and fresh from his university, when he took 
his first job as reader in the editorial office of 
The Public Square, a weekly magazine of opinion and 
protest and qualified patriotism. This was the pub¬ 
lication of old John Higgins, at one time one of the 
highest-priced editorial writers in New York; but 
Higgins’ views had become more and more strenuous, 
instead of mollifying with the years, the end of which 
is to publish for one’s self or subside. Even in The 
Public Square he found himself under a pull. He 
wanted a living out of his magazine, but did not expect 
to make money. He occasionally drank himself ill for 
a day or two. One of his aspirations was to publish a 
distinguished short story in each issue, the shorter the 
better. 

“But there aren’t fifty a year,” he frequently said. 

10 


THE COLORED MAN 


“There aren’t ten, but we get two or three of them.” 

Richard Cobden came of a well-established New 
York family of merchants and manufacturers. There 
was no traceable connection, so far as the family knew, 
with the English Cobdens, of whom there had been 
a brave Richard of free trade and free speech. Dicky’s 
great-grandfather was the Richard Cobden who first 
made the Cobden trowel, hand-forged in a little shop 
up Yonkers way, and made it so well that stone 
masons used to drive from far in back country to his 
shop. The Cobdens had made and dealt in hardware 
ever since, but the trowel was the Cobden cachet. 

Dicky was now twenty-four. His eyes were strong 
and so were his enthusiasms. These strengths stood 
him in good stead against the vast masses of evil typing 
and the revelations of human frailty contained in a 
myriad manuscript attempts. There was a mere screen 
between his desk and the desk of John Higgins. One 
winter afternoon, Dicky was interrupted by talk be¬ 
tween the chief and the office boy: 

“That colored guy in the reception room won’t go 
’way,” the boy said. 

“What guy is that?” Higgins asked. 

“The one I told you about two hours ago when you 
came back from lunch.” 

“What does he want?” 

“He’s got a story. He says he’ll wait for you.” 

“What’s his name?” 

“It ain’t a natcherl name. He says the name doesn’t 
matter—that you don’t know him, anyway.” 

II 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“Tell him to leave his manuscript.” 

“He won’t. Every little while he pulls up his sock.” 

“Let him sit a bit longer. It’s a regular park bench 
out there, anyway-” 

It was the dragging sock that attracted Dicky Cob- 
den—a bit of mindless art on the part of the office 
boy that somehow aroused the young man by the 
dreary manuscript pile. Dicky’s world was now full 
of people who thought they had the story of the age; 
people who wanted to see the publisher himself; people 
afraid to trust their manuscripts to the mails; a world 
of such, coming up through great tribulation, but only 
here and there a dragging sock. He took a chance now 
and volunteered to Higgins to clear that bit of seat 
space in the reception room, if possible. 

A dark-faced young man arose to meet him outside. 
Tired—that was the word that bored into Cobden’s 
mind with new meaning. There was something potent 
in the weariness of the black eyes, a deadly sort of 
patience that rarely goes with brilliance. Dicky was 
slightly above medium height. The other’s eyes were 
level with his own. The hanging sock was not in evi¬ 
dence, but Dicky felt that the stranger didn’t dare to 
move fast, for fear his clothes would break. 

“Yet he feels clean,” he thought, “yet he feels clean.” 
This was important enough to repeat. 

“I have a story-” 

“Your name?” 

“It is Naidu—but not known.” 

“Are you from India?” 


12 




THE COLORED MAN 


“Yes.” 

“Why not let us have your story to read ?” 

“It must be read now.” 

“This sort of thing isn’t done while one waits, you 
know.” 

“I’m afraid this one will have to be done so.” 

“Why, even if it’s promising,” Dicky declared se¬ 
verely, “it would have to be read several times.” 

“I’ll wait.” 

“But we have hundreds-” 

“I know—may I not see the chief editor?” 

Mr. Naidu turned slowly back to the bench, as if 
to resume his seat. 

“You win,” Dicky slowly said. “I’ll take the story 
and read it now, though I’m only a deck hand. If it 
looks good enough, I’ll try to get Mr. Higgins to 
look-” 

Five minutes after that, Dicky was deep in South 
Africa. Six thousand words in neat but faded typing, 
called The Little Man, about a diminutive Hindu person 
who appeared to have no other business in life but to 
stand up for the under dog. This person would fight 
anything, but the British Government was about the size 
of a foe he liked best—a cheerful story of most shock¬ 
ing suffering, which the Little Man took upon himself 
for the natives of Natal—no, not the natives, but for 
the Hindu laborers who had come to Africa to settle. 
A clear, burning patience through the pages; everything 
was carried in solution—all one breath, sustained. It 
J 3 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


wasn’t writing. It was living. It slid on with a soft 
inevitable rhythm, and it took Dicky along. 

More than this, he saw in the story—or in the great 
stillness which the story brought him—something of 
the sort of thing he meant to write some day. Nothing 
exactly like this, of course, but the achievement of this 
unfettered ease. It made him want to start out at once 
to find the Little Man. It made him hear from Africa 
something like a personal call. He let himself dream 
for a moment. Wouldn’t it be great, his mind-made 
picture ran, when he had done a real story of his own 
—wouldn’t it be great to deliver it like this (or perhaps 
sockless) and make it sell itself? Halfway through, 
he arose and dumped the sheets he had read before 
Higgins’ spectacles, saying with slow-measured calm: 

“She breathes. She’s a leaping trout!” 

“Get out,” said Higgins softly. 

“That’s only half,” said Cobden. 

“Where’s the rest?” 

“I’ve got it in there—not read yet.” 

“And you bring this to me?” 

“He’s waiting. This story will finish itself. I know 
it will march straight.” 

While he read the second half, Dicky heard Higgins 
thresh and mutter, and finally call for the rest—old 
sore-eyed Higgins, who knew a story when he saw one, 
who had read his eyes out on poor stories looking for 
the Story of the Age. . . . 

Dicky went back to the reception room. 

“I’ve read it. Mr. Higgins is reading it now. I 



THE COLORED MAN 


think he’ll want it, Mr. Naidu. If you leave your 
address, we’ll mail you an offer to-morrow-” 

“I will take two hundred dollars for the story, but 
I must have the money to-day.” 

Dicky laughed quietly. “I’m afraid the counting- 
room won’t appreciate that. Countingroom’s not 
adaptable. It’s intricate, in fact; checks signed and 
countersigned. . . . Besides your price is severe for 
us—unknown name and all that. Oh, it’s not too 
much, only for us, you know.’ 

All the time he talked, Dicky knew Mr. Naidu would 
get his money, and get it to-day. A man with a story 
like this could get anything. He could write it on 
wood chips and bring the manuscript in a gunny 
sack. . . . 

“I’ll give him my personal check,” he told Higgins, 
a moment later. “The office can reimburse me.” 

“I always forget you have a piece of change in 
your own name,” Higgins remarked indulgently. 
“Don’t ever let it interfere with your work, Dicky.” 

“My work to-day is to get that manuscript in our 
vault. Later,” he added to himself, “my work is to 
write a story as good as that.” 

“He might take less than two hundred-” John 

Higgins suggested in uncertain tone. 

“I can’t bring that up—again,” Dicky said. 

“I couldn’t either,” said the editor. “Maybe we 
are both crazy with the heat—steam heat. But I’ll 
stand by and see that you get your money. You’ll 
15 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


have to go out with him to get cash on your personal 
check.” 

Dicky and Mr. Naidu were in the street. It was 
too late for the bank, but the son of the trowel makers 
found a friend of the family with currency. A rainy 
dusk in Twenty-third Street near the Avenue, when 
he took Mr. Naidu’s hand, having turned over the 
money. 

“I have your address, I may hunt you up. You won’t 
forget The Public Square, when you have another story 
as good as this?” 

“Oh, no,” said the Hindu, “nor you, Mr. Cobden. 
Good-by.” 

Dicky turned to look after him. He reflected that 
he hadn’t even learned if Mr. Naidu were hungry. He 
wished he had given him his umbrella. He felt a 
curious desire to follow; a sense vague, as yet, that his 
way, the way of his Big Story, lay after the Oriental, 
and not back toward the office. 




Ill 


A FISH OMELET 

S NOW had drifted into the outer basement 
stairway of the green house, and there was a 
thin frosty bar inside the door of the base¬ 
ment hall. Miss Claes opened the door and looked out 
through the iron railings to the street. Snow was six 
inches deep and still falling. She took a deep breath 
appreciatively, as if she found some faint exquisite 
scent in the cold air. Presently she began sweeping at 
the doorway, and continued up the stone steps to the 
walk. Her arms and throat were bare, and the dark 
gray dress that she wore was of wool but the fabric 
very thin. Apparently Miss Claes chose to enjoy the 
chill of the winter morning. When she returned to 
her living room, the fire in the grate had been started 
and a small cup of black coffee was on the table. She 
sipped thoughtfully and then lit a cigarette, which she 
half finished, standing by the fireplace. 

The kindling had ignited the soft coal, but not with¬ 
out having shot out a spray of cinders over the cement 
hearth. Miss Claes swept the hearth unhurriedly. A 
cabinet of dishes across the room from the fireplace 
was full of color now from the light of the coals 
—vivid greens and bronzes, pomegranate reds. At 
17 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


length, she opened the door to the kitchen, where an 
Oriental stood by the big range. 

“May I serve your breakfast?” he asked. 

“Put it on a tray with something for Pidge. I’ll 
take it upstairs and perhaps she’ll join me. The child 
starves.” 

“Not in this house-” 

“She’s troublesome to do anything for, Nagar. She 
rebels against accepting any favor. I think she must 
have been forced to accept many favors from people 
outside, when she lived with her father. Was there a 
bit of boiled halibut left from last night?” 

“Yes.” 

“We’ll make a little omelet with a few flakes of fish 
in it. I’m sure she isn’t getting any money from her 
father, but she has kept up her rent in advance. Did 
she work all night?” 

“Her room was quiet after two, until I came down. 
Then I heard her typewriter as I swept the upper 
hall.” 

“It seems to be a race, Nagar, between the child and 
her book—which will finish the other ? I love her spirit, 
but she isn’t taking care of herself. . . . Yes, we’ll 
put in these asparagus tips. ... I think Mr. Musser 
believes that the world owes him a living, but finds it 
hard to collect, sometimes, with only metaphysics to 
offer. And now Pidge has flung herself to the opposite 
extreme; talks of earning her living in a factory, when 
her book is done. She’s a living protest against talking 
and not doing. We must be very good to her, Nagar.” 
18 




A FISH OMELET 


Miss Claes brought a little creamy porcelain urn, 
and held it for him to fill with coffee from the larger 
pot. Nagar held the door open for her into the base¬ 
ment hall. A moment later on the top floor, she tapped 
at the second last door on the left. Pidge sat at her 
machine under the gaslight beyond the head of the cot. 

“I can’t make their swords play!” she moaned. “All 
my swords are stiff as shinny sticks. The trouble is, 
I don’t know men, Miss Claes—not red animal men 
like they should be in this story. I know pussy men. 
I know pious men, salvey and wormy men, monks and 
mummies and monsters, but I don’t know honest-to- 
God men! Here they are taunting each other as they 
stab, and their talk sounds—like Shakespeare! Oh, 
dear, you’ve brought me more coffee and eats!” 

“I won’t touch your papers, Pidge, but if you take 
them off the cot, I’ll put the tray between us. I haven’t 
had breakfast.” 

Pidge turned the roller of her typemill down so that 
the most recent literary revelation might not appear to 
a roving eye. Then she crisscrossed different packages 
of manuscript, placed the mass face down before the 
waving glass, and moved the oil stove aside so she could 
pass to her place on the cot. 

“You always forget to bring your coffeepot down 
to the range, Pidge-” 

The girl turned back to her typemachine. “He’s 
a jealous old devil when I leave the room,” she said. 
“I think the person who rented him before I did ad¬ 
dressed envelopes all day—kept cranking him back and 
19 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


forth against time. Now I ride a little ways—then let 
him stop and browse. We ramble-” 

Pidge stopped. Her eyes looked dry and smarting, 
as if tears were on the verge. 

“Oh, Miss Claes,” she went on, “I’m just as crazy 
as that—I mean my figures of speech! Cranking him 
back and forth, and in the same breath letting him 
stop and browse. I wish you wouldn’t bring me this 
stuff any more. The coffee’s so good that it hurts 
—and the eggs. I always cry when I’m hurt.” 

“But, Pidge, think what a privilege it is for me to 
climb from the heart of New York to eighteenth-cen¬ 
tury France, and not leave the house-” 

“But you find a twisted cubist sort of France—part 
Dumas, part Mexican Plaza, Los Angeles, and the 
rest me!” 

“At least, you’re not carried away with the idea 
that it’s perfect.” 

Pidge regarded the other’s face closely. She could 
see with uncanny clearness in this little dark room 
where she had struggled night and day for nearly three 
months; but what she saw now, or was looking for, 
she hardly knew herself. Her own face was spooky 
from sleepless strain. 

“I’m eating shamelessly,” she said. 

A moment later, she pointed to the rear wall, and 
whispered the question: 

“Has Nagar stopped writing? I haven’t raced type¬ 
writers with him lately.” 

“He hasn’t spoken of changing his work. Did you 
20 





A FISH OMELET 


hear that New York has touched him with her magic?” 
Miss Claes asked. 

“What do you mean?” 

“He has sold a story—a short story for two hun¬ 
dred dollars to The Public Square.” 

“Nagar—your servant?” 

“He isn’t my servant, Pidge. He just lives here and 
works with me.” 

There was a clicking dryness to the girl’s tongue, as 
she asked: 

“And now is he going away? You said they always 
do when they strike it rich.” 

“Oh, no. Nagar wouldn’t leave for a little story 
success. But nobody quite knows Nagar—nobody.” 

Pidge was alone. The Lance of the Rivernais was 
pricking at her to get back to work, but she resisted 
for a few minutes, thinking of Miss Claes. 

“ . . . She may be crazy, but she’s good to look 
at,” she muttered. “I believe she can look into me, 
too. ... I wonder what she is? . . . She may be 
crazy, but she’s kind! And, oh, I’m so tired,” she 
yawned a moment later. “I’d like—I’d like to be a 
leaf in the park under the snow—still snowing, and 
sleep till spring. Only I’d like some roast turkey first.” 

The recent breakfast had an extraordinary flavor, 
but it was all too dainty for one who had eaten little 
or nothing since yesterday morning. Her mind trailed 
off to buns she had seen in bakery windows; and 
delicatessen stores with opened sausages, big as one’s 
21 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


head and colored like tapestries, and little brown birds 
and deviled eggs, and sliced filets of fish of amazing 
tint. 

All meats had been anathema in the house of Mr. 
Adolph Musser. Pidge had lived in no other house 
in all her years, before coming to New York, but since 
then, she had shocked her young self through various 
experiments among the fleshpots of Greenwich. Not 
so various, for the narrowness of her purse was ever 
a limp fact, but these few flavory adventures were 
exciting and memorable. There was a tap of a finger 
nail upon the panel. 

“A letter, Miss Musser,” Nagar said. 

She looked at the Hindu with different eyes from 
ever before. He had sold a story. She wanted to 
speak of it, wanted to sit before him and listen—this 
anomaly, whose typewriter she had sometimes heard 
through the partition, and rarely a low deep hum. She 
was prejudiced against Hindus, because her father had 
affected such a knowledge of them, but somehow she 
had been less lonely in New York because of this one. 
He was embodied Detachment and Impersonality. . . . 
He had turned away. 

“Thanks, Nagar,” she called. 

The letter was a typewriter bill. 




IV 


LAMBILL KNOCKS 

I NSIDE the moonlit castle gardens, across the 
moat into the pictured halls, up the marble stair¬ 
case, driving straight and true, Lambill Courtenay, 
a man of the people—artist, swordsman, lover virgin- 
hearted, rode—no, ran, for once on his sprightly feet, 
straight to a sequestered wing of the ancient and noble 
castle of the Rivernais, and with his ungloved hand 
touched the knocker of its inner sanctuary. 

“Who is there?” came the cry like the thin note of 
violins. 

“I-” swelled the deep orchestral answer of Lam¬ 

bill Courtenay, Frenchiest of the French. 

Then the great oaken door from the forests of Savoie 
opened. Lambill crossed the threshold. The white 
arms of Madelaine Rivernais opened and the heavens 
opened also—for the great maze of life had been 
untangled for these two—and Pidge Musser’s book 
was done. 

Just a book—one of the myriads that you see lying 
around, like sloughed snake skins on first or secondhand 
bookshelves—but it had been properly wept on and 
starved for and toiled over, as only youth in its aban¬ 
donment can toil for its own ends. It had almost been 
23 



THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


prayed for, but not quite. Prayer wasn’t easy for 
Pidge Musser’s defiant soul. 

It was two in the morning. The oil stove smelled 
as if it were dying. Of late the wick had hiked up 
out of the oil a little earlier each night like a waxing 
moon, and Pidge had been forced to shake the oil 
around to keep the flame. Miss Claes and Nagar did 
so much for her, she was ashamed; and you could get 
a red apple for the price of a wick. 

Pidge coughed. It was the most astonishing and 
cavernous bark. The silence afterward was painful. 
She fancied she was keeping him awake—the silent, 
dark and courteous Nagar, who did prodigies of work 
every day and was always willing to do more, and who 
had come into Pidge’s direct limelight since his sale 
of a story to The Public Square. Pidge hadn’t known 
a cold for years. It actually amazed her, how unclean 
it made her feel, and ashamed to have anybody come 
near. 

“I’m going to watch over you very closely, Pidge 
—you’ll have to let me, now that the book is done,” 
Miss Claes said in the morning, “because it’s really a 
shock to stop work after the way you have carried 
on. The drive—suddenly stopping, you know.” 

“I wonder how she knows?” Pidge thought to her¬ 
self for the thousandth time in regard to the subtle 
capacities of Miss Claes. 

“I’m tough,” she said aloud. 

“That is a true saying, Pidge. On that, everything 
hinges. Am I to hear the story?” 

24 




LAMBILL KNOCKS 


“It would—it must be read aloud. It’s terrible to 
ask, but will you?” 

“I’ve wanted to hear it from the beginning. Now 
tell me, would you like Nagar to listen, too?” 

“Oh, no!” 

“Just as you like. Only you’re offering it to the 
world later-” 

“But Nagar knows” 

“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” 

“Oh, yes, but-” 

“He won’t say a word. Nagar rarely talks, except 
to answer questions. But, of course, don’t think of 
it, if you’d rather not” 

“What is Nagar?” Pidge asked suddenly. 

“Just a watcher and listener in America, learning 
to see things impersonally.” 

Pidge contemplated the idea for a few seconds; 
then her eyes hardened. “I’ve heard lots of talk about 
the impersonal—oh, talk to the skies about the imper¬ 
sonal life in Los Angeles—by people who haven’t yet 
got a personality!” 

Miss Claes bent in low laughter. 

“They start in killing out personality before they 
get a live one,” Pidge added sullenly. 

“They do, my dear, but have you heard any words 
about the impersonal life from Nagar?” 

“No. That’s the best thing about him—that he 
doesn’t explain himself. But I hate mysteries about 
Hindus—hate people moving about saying, ‘Shh-sh’ 
—finger on their lips, trying to astonish you with 
25 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


something they can’t tell. I’m so tired of all that!” 

“Still you asked me about Nagar, though really there 
is nothing to say, except that he is good to have in the 
house.” 

“I think I’ll let him come and hear the reading, if 
he’s willing.” 

“Good,” said Miss Claes. “We will listen in this 
room, where the story came to be.” 

.... Nagar sat in a straight chair, in the aisle 
between the cot and the wall. Pidge sat by the window 
before her machine. Miss Claes lay on the cot with 
her head under the light that Pidge read by, and away 
they went. There was an hour or more in the early 
afternoon when both Miss Claes and her helper could 
escape from below, and two hours, at least, after nine 
in the evening—this for three days. 

Pidge was fagged and ill and frightfully scared. 
She would begin hoarsely, and for pages in each read¬ 
ing her cold in the head was an obstruction hard to 
pass; besides, she felt she was boring them horribly 
and that all the massed effects of her pages dithered 
away into nothing or worse. But a moment came in 
each of the six sessions, when the last monster of the 
mind’s outer darkness was passed. And then, for 
Pidge, at least, knighthood rose resplendent; days be¬ 
came stately, indeed, and chivalry bloomed again. At 
such times the dark gleaming hair of Miss Claes— 
which Pidge could have touched with her hand, became 
the tresses of Madelaine Rivernais herself, and a little 
26 




LAMBILL KNOCKS 


back to the right in the deep shadows, the face of the 
Easterner there took on the magic and glamour of 
Lambill’s own. The vineyards of old France stretched 
beyond from their balcony; the rivers of France flowed 
below. The lance of the Rivernais was won back 
heroically and human hearts opened to the drama of 
love and life. 

But on the last night of the reading, after the self- 
consciousness was passed and all was going well, Pidge, 
glancing down to Miss Claes’ head under the light, saw 
gray for the first time, in the depths of her hair. It 
hadn’t been combed with any purpose of hiding. The 
outer strands were coal black, the strands beneath had 
turned. This discovery had the peculiar effect of 
changing everything around in Pidge’s mind in the 
moments that followed. 

She couldn’t get into the story as before; and in the 
very last pages of her reading, a face persistently 
crowded in between her mind’s eye and the rapid flow 
of the story at its end—a long, humorless complacent 
face—the high-browed, self-willed and self-thrilled face 
of her father. It was as if he were reading and not 
herself; reading with rising expectation, drinking in 
the silent praise, as if he had done the writing himself 
and loved it well. So effectually was Pidge mastered 
by this apparition of her own mind, that the last pages 
of the manuscript were spoiled entirely. The light had 
gone out of her and she said hastily, as the final page 
was turned down: 


27 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“I know how kind you are, but please don't try to 
tell me anything to-night. Not a word, please!” 

There was something in Nagar’s smile as he turned 
and went out that she knew she would remember again. 

“I quite understand,” said Miss Claes, when they 
were alone. “But say, Pidge, I do want to say this. 
To-morrow afternoon, Mr. Richard Cobden, an editor 
of The Public Square, is coming here to see Nagar. 
He is the one who put through Nagar’s story. We’re 
to have tea at four. You’ll come down, won’t you?” 

“Why, yes, of course.” 

“It might be arranged for Mr. Cobden to look at 
your book. Would you like that?” 

“Ye-es.” 

“Do you mind if I suggest something?” 

“Please,” said Pidge. 

“Don’t let Mr. Cobden know, just yet, that you are 
the one who has written the story. Write a new title- 
page without the name of the author.” 

“All right, but-” 

“It’s because you look like such a child, Pidge. No 
one would be able to see all that’s in your story—if 
they saw what a child you are!” 

“I’ll do as you say. Thank you, but, Miss Claes-” 

“Yes?” 

“To-night under the light, I saw your hair—under¬ 
neath !” 

“Yes?” 

“It made me see everything differently for a minute. 
You know I hate cults and everything that apes India 
28 






LAMBILL KNOCKS 


and talks about saving the world; everybody talking 
about their souls, but doing the same old secret selfish 
things—oh, I’ve almost died of talk about all that— 
but for a minute, to-night under the lamp, it seemed 
that you knew, but had come down to brass tacks— 
your feet on the ground—living like the rest of us, 
*but not ‘falling for’ love or money or fame, as we are. 
Are you really through talking about service—just 
doing it?” 

Miss Claes laughed. “Such a lot of words, Pidge 
—about some gray hair.” 

Pidge was intensely serious. “Are you English?” 
she began again. 

“Yes.” 

“I know you’ve been in India. Miss Claes — are 
you really farther along than I thought ? Are you try¬ 
ing for that impersonal thing—trying to belong to 
everybody—to enter the stream of humanity, as they 
call it?” 

“Of course, I’m trying, Pidge.” 

“You and Nagar working together?” 

“Yes, but you and I are working together, too.” 

Pidge was not to be turned aside by generalities. 

“You—down here in lower New York—keeping a 
rooming house?” 

“Why not?” 

“Nothing—only it’s so big, so unexpected. I’ve 
always believed ’way down deep that a real person 
wouldn’t be long-haired or barefooted or pious, but 
lost in the crowd something like that—quietly efficient, 
29 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


moving here and there among people unannounced, only 
a few ever dreaming! Oh, it’s too, too big!” 

“Don’t try to believe anything, Pidge.” 

“I’ve been spoiled for believing anything, by so 
much talk!” 

“Don’t try to settle things ahead of time,” Miss Claes 
repeated laughingly. “Let the days—each day tell its 
story. I’m just living out life as you are. . . . And 
now undress and get into bed. I know you’re too tired 
to sleep, but I’m going to fix you in and open your 
window and put out your light, and sit with you for a 
minute, perhaps in the dark. You’re just to rest— 
a tired little girl—and not even hear me go away.” 




V 


LUNCHEON AT SHARPE’S 
CHARD COBDEN and John Higgins were 



lunching at Sharpe’s Chop House. It was 


one-thirty, and at the height of the day’s busi¬ 
ness. The tables were packed close. 

“You were telling me about that Asiatic landlady 
down in the Village,” Higgins said, lifting his spectacles 
to wipe his red-rimmed eyes. 

“I wasn’t telling you much,” said Dicky. “She’s 
too deep for me—looks to thrive on coffee and ciga¬ 
rettes—-eyes that have seen too much, a lot of laughter 
in them, but no hope. . . . And what would you think 
of a basement room, with flowers in winter and a fire¬ 
place* with hickory embers, a Byzantine jar in the corner 
and a cabinet of porcelain which I haven’t seen the like 
of on this side?” 

“Go on—don’t mind me,” said John Higgins. 

“ . . . Little old Harrow Street,” Dicky mused. 
“Harrow Street curves, you know. There is quite 
a mass of rooming houses on each side, and number 
Fifty-four, with a green front, is Miss Claes’ house. 
And our Mr. Naidu works there with his hands; only 
they call him Nagar in that house—spelled with an 
‘a’ but pronounced ‘nog.’ ... By the way, he told 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


me twice, yesterday, that it isn’t a fiction story we’ve 
bought, but a handling of things that actually hap¬ 
pened in Africa—Little Man an actual human being 
named Gandhi or something of the sort.” 

“Can’t be done. Fiction and life are different,” 
said John Higgins. 

Dicky resumed: “Some of Miss Claes’ lodgers 
happened in for the tea party. No one barred appar¬ 
ently. I must have seen most of the houseful: couple 
of girl-pals; one works in a restaurant to support the 
other who is to become a prima donna; a couple of 
decayed vaudeville artists looking for a legacy—a regu¬ 
lar houseful, but I don’t believe all of them pay, as they 
would have to in other houses.” 

“Landlady supports those who can’t?” 

“That’s the way I see it. The green front in Harrow 
Street took hold of me. I must have stayed over two 
hours. Our Mr. Naidu made some coffee to go with 
that cabinet of porcelain. Also there was a little girl 
—from Los Angeles, I think they said—red head, 
brown wool dress and eyes of a blue you see on illu¬ 
mined vellum out of Italy-” 

“Some cerulean,” said John Higgins. 

“They weren’t large, particularly,” Dicky went on 
at his literary best, “but that extraordinary blue like 
the ocean. Ruffled on top, but calm and still in the 
depth! Never saw such eyes. They come back to 
me now-” 

“They do to me, Dicky.” 

“You’re not getting all I mean, John. Uptown here, 
32 




LUNCHEON AT SHARPE’S 


we think we’re the center of the world, the heart of 
New York yanking up toward the Park—but down 
there those old rooming houses are filling up with the 
boys and girls from all the States west, and the 
second growths from the families of European immi¬ 
grants—filling up because they are cheap, with the 
boys and girls who will do the surgery ten years from 
now, and the painting and writing and acting-” 

“I’ve heard about all that,” said John Higgins. 
“You’ll do a big story yourself one day.” 

“I’m not so sure of it, since yesterday. I couldn’t 
take their chances. I couldn’t sit down and do a novel 
and not know how I was going to eat my way through. 
I couldn’t scrub tenement-house floors for the privilege 
of writing a book. . . . Oh, I love books all right. 
I rise up and yell when a big short story comes in the 
office, or breaks out anywhere. I think I know a real 
one, but a man’s got to do a whole lot of appreciating 
before he gets to doing. I’m not bred somehow as 
those people are. I’m the first of the Cobdens to break 
out of trade. They call me a dreamer, my people do 
—yet compared to those boys and girls in Harrow 
Street, I’m a basket of fish with only a wiggle at the 
bottom-” 

“Get out,” said John Higgins. “The first thing 
you know, you’ll be going down there again.” 

“I will,” said Dicky. “I’m going down there to 
live.” 

“Eh?” 

The younger man nodded seriously. “They’re crazy, 

33 






THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


perhaps, but I’m convinced from yesterday of one 
thing: One can’t be sane as I am, and ever find the 
Big Story, much less write it.” 

“Therefore the first thing to do is to go insane.” 

“It isn’t like that,” Dicky said gently. “I’ve been 
brought up to think I know New York, belong and 
breathe in New York. You see, my family has lived 
here a hundred years. But yesterday I saw New York 
for the first time. She isn’t an old Dutch frump, 
as we thought, John. She’s a damsel! She’s a new 
moon-” 

“Blue eyes?” said John Higgins. 

“No, that’s the little girl from Los Angeles. It’s 
the landlady, of course, who’s the spirit of the place. 
I figured out afterward that it was because she was 
there that I liked everybody and had a good time. 
Wouldn’t be surprised to hear she was a priestess of 
some sort. I asked if she were Hindu, and she said 
‘Yes,’ but she talks as if she were out of an English 
convent. Of course, most of her lodgers don’t get her. 
One old actor, out of a job, leaned across the table to 
me yesterday when Miss Claes left the room. He 
tapped his forehead, whispering, ‘Lovely, eh, but got 
the Ophelias.’ ” 

“Is she young?” John Higgins asked presently. 

“Moreover,” Dicky added, lost in thought, “I be¬ 
lieve Miss Claes knows that they think her cracked 
and doesn’t mind. . . . Young? Say, I don’t know, 
John. You don’t think of her with years, somehow 
34 





LUNCHEON AT SHAKPE’S 


—rather as one who has reached the top of herself 
and decided to stay there.” 

John Higgins leaned back, drained his coffee cup 
and stared with eyes that smarted at the steaming ceil¬ 
ing. “Is Naidu going to do us another story ?” 

“We didn’t get to that, but they gave me a novel 
manuscript to read. ,, 

“His?” 

“No, I didn’t get it straight whose it was. Miss 
Claes handed it over, suggesting I look at it for a 
serial. Some one in the house had written it or left 
it there.” 

“We’d better be going back to the office. Have you 
read into the novel?” 

“Started, but didn’t get really going. It’s back-age 
France stuff, and I was a little lost last night on the 
subject of 54 Harrow Street.” 

“You’re a little lost yet, Dicky, I should say—for 
a Cobden. ... So you’re going to lead a double life? 
Rich young New Yorker, quarters in Fiftieth Street 
under the eaves of St. Patrick’s, vanishing into life 
down in Greenwich.” 

Dicky’s eyes were keen with memory. 




VI 


ENTER, FANNY GALLUP 


r HE Lance of the Rivernais had been in the 
editorial rooms of The Public Square for al¬ 
most a month, but there had been no report; 
not the slightest mention, in fact, though author and 
editor were frequently together. Richard Cobden had 
come to 54 Harrow Street to live for the larger part 
of each week. Pidge had gone to work in a tin-can 
factory up Lenox way, pasting labels. She was half 
sick from fatigue from the new work and from keeping 
the secret about her book. In the days that followed 
the finishing of the Lance, it was as if her whole body 
and brain had been a scaffold or matrix for the story, 
and it had been taken from her, leaving a galvanism 
useless as an eggshell, a sort of afterbirth that persisted 
in staying alive. 

. . . There was Fanny Gallup, who sat at her right, 
elbow to elbow at the pasting bench—Fanny of the 
intermittent pungencies of scent and the dreary muck 
of talk about boys and boys and boys. Fanny was a 
child and woman all in one, about Pidge’s age and 
size, one whom you could fancy had been a stringy 
street-kid a year or two ago. But just now, Fanny 
36 


ENTER, FANNY GALLUP 


was in her brief bloom, red in her lips, a lift to her 
scant breast, the earth driving into her and overflowing 
with such color and fertility as it could. 

For eight hours a day, Pidge dwelt in Fanny’s fre¬ 
quently tropical aura—hateful, yet marveling. The 
thing that amazed her was that Fanny loved life so, 
loved the feel of her own hands when she rubbed them 
together, loved the taste of sweets and the memory of 
last night’s kisses—loved fearlessly and without re¬ 
serve, not a pang of dread for what was to come, nor 
a shudder of regret for what had happened to her 
mother or sisters or the other girls of Foley Street. 
Never a thought in Fanny’s head that she was being 
hoaxed by Nature; that her body was being livened 
and rounded, her face edged and tinted, for an inex¬ 
orable purpose; not a suspicion that she was being 
played for, and must presently produce. 

Fanny lived her brief hour to the full, and Pidge 
Musser suffered and revolted for two. Pidge took 
the dreary monotone of talk into her soul, as she 
had taken her father’s, knowing that one day she would 
be full. 

“Oh, you Musser,” Fanny would say. “Why don’t 
you come over to Foley Street? . . . You’re dryin’ 
up, Redhead. What do you do nights ? What do you 
do all the time, thinkin’ and listnin’? . . Where’s 
your fulluh, Redhead? Ain’t got one—wot? Little 
liar. You’re bad, you are, because you’re so still. . . . 
Come on over to Foley Street to-night. I’ll let you 
have a peep at Albert, m’li’l barber—just one peep, 

37 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


Redhead—not too close. I ain’t sure of him yet, but 
I’ll let you have one look—aw come on!” 

So it was through the hours, pasting apricot labels, 
lobster, asparagus, pimento, peach, and codfish labels. 
More and more Fanny’s boys and men folded into one, 
whose name was Albert. 

“I’m gettin’ him goin’—goin’, goin\ Psst! an’ 
he comes!” Fanny would say. “But I wouldn’t trust 
him to you, Musser—not longer than a hairpin, dam’ 
little party, you.” 


Miss Claes was observing with some concern the 
result of her suggestion to Pidge, not to let the young 
editor know the Lance was hers. 

“If it hadn’t been for my tampering, she would have 
heard about her book before this,” she said to Nagar. 
“Pidge looked so young, I felt it would prejudice Mr. 
Cobden against her work. He’s fascinated with Har¬ 
row Street, but seems to have no time or thought for 
a romance of eighteenth-century France! Yet he would 
have put through her book in a week, if he knew, see¬ 
ing the story with the same eyes he sees the author.” 

“And she doesn’t tell him?” 

“No. That’s our Pidge, Nagar. I even suggested 
that I would speak to him—let the truth slip out. She 
caught me in her hands, those hard little hands, strong 
as a peasant’s, 'Not for worlds, Miss Claes!’ she 
breathed, and there was a patch of white intensity across 
her upper lip, ‘Not for worlds!’” 

38 




ENTER, FANNY GALLUP 


.... Of course, I mean to write,” Pidge had 
granted to Dicky in the very beginning. “I’ve always 
meant to write, since the day I learned that print 
wasn’t done above the clouds somehow, like Moses’ 
tablets, and had to be written all out first by human 

beings. But I’m not ready to begin-” and she 

silently added the word “again” for her own com¬ 
posure. 

“But they tell me on my floor when you first came, 
you hammered a typemill day and night. Was it 
commercial work?” Dicky asked. 

“It was not ” said Pidge, with such emphasis that 
she felt her secret endangered again and hastened to 
add, “That was before I started to work in the factory. 
Likely they heard Nagar’s machine part of the time.” 

“But you seem to know yarns—like one who works 
with them—tries to do them,I mean,” he remarked. 

Her face was flushed. Evasion irritated and dimin¬ 
ished her. She coldly explained her father’s profes¬ 
sional interest in the short story. 

“He isn’t an artist, but he teaches how, you know,” 
she finished. 

Dicky pondered long on how much Pidge meant by 
this. He had been brought up to revere his parents. 
Surely, he thought, she must know that one can’t be 
taught except by life itself to do a real story. 

One rainy Sunday forenoon in February, they were 
sitting together in his “parlor,” the front of his two 
rooms on the second floor. This room opened through 
a single door to the main hall, and through folding 
39 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


doors to his sleeping quarters. Dicky had brought 
some few additional furnishings from his mother’s 
house in East Fiftieth Street. The place made Pidge 
feel uncomfortable, but Miss Claes’ basement front 
was often in use and subject to constant interruption. 

“I want to read you something I’ve brought from 
the office,” Dicky said. “I’m not saying a word—until 
afterward.” 

It was a little story called Dr. Filter, by an unknown 
young man, named Rufus Melton. It had come to 
The Public Square among the unsolicited manuscripts. 
Pidge listened with extraordinary restlessness. She 
seemed to know so much about this story, its processes 
and the thing it told, that her mind was unpleasantly 
crowded. It wasn’t a matter of like or dislike. Dr. 
Filter was here in the world, a live thing. It had to 
be met and dealt with. 

“Not more than once a year, one comes in as live 
as this,” Dicky said. “Yet it’s like something from a 
different world from Nagar’s Little Man story.” 

“It isn’t whether you like Dr. Filter, or not, but you 
can’t get away from it—like a relative who comes to 
live in your house,” said Pidge. 

“That’s a center shot,” Dicky thoughtfully remarked. 

She found herself asking about Rufus Melton. 
Dicky didn’t know much, but was intensely pleased 
over her reaction to his latest artistic find. . . . Pidge 
never lacked opinions, even verdicts, nor the energy 
to express them when Dicky was around. They forgot 
40 




ENTER, FANNY GALLUP 


Rufus Melton, and out-generaled time in discussing 
Miss Claes. 

“Every little while as she talks, I feel as if I were 
going through a tunnel/' he said. “Of course, I admire 
her, and all that, but sometimes I can't help asking 
myself, like the others, if she is really right-" 

“The more ignorant one is, the more crazy he thinks 
Miss Claes," Pidge observed. 

“Another bull's-eye. Wait till I set up the target 
again, Pidge. But is it because she’s Hindu—that she’s 
so different?" 

“She isn't Hindu. She’s English." 

“I asked her." 

“So did I." 

“She'll have to referee this herself," Dicky hastily 
put in. 

Then they were silent awhile, until Pidge said: 

“Maybe I heard her wrong. I’m sure she’s had a 
lot of Hindu training. But that's not what draws me 
to her. It’s because she’s not taking it out in talk. She 
knows about plumbing and cooking and streets and 
common things. Best of all, she pays her bills!" 

But Dicky, who had never known other than financial 
ease and financial integrity, was more interested in the 
other side of their landlady. 

“Can one get books—on her sort of thing?" he 
asked. 

“You’re always getting me into this lately," Pidge 
complained. “I don’t like to talk about it. I floated 
up through zones of Hindu stuff from a child. Better 
4i 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


leave it alone, Dicky. Stay in your head—stay down.” 
“What do you mean, ‘Stay in your head/ please?” 
“Any one who amounts to anything stays in his 
head. He’s not complicated by souls. All the com¬ 
fortable, solid world calls you absurd for what you 
say and the way you look, when this Eastern stuff 
starts you going. You get so absorbed that you lose 
all touch with things down here, the things you are really 
here to do. You stop making money and go around 
saying the Lord will provide. You don’t really let Him, 
you let other people support you and call it God’s work. 
You call yourself the Elect, and yet you can’t do the 
things that average people do. Mainly, you talk. You 
stop work to talk. You settle heaven and God and 
the soul with talk! . . . Oh, Dicky, that’s why I hate 
it all so; that’s why I’d rather be a factory girl; that’s 
why I’m all lame and tired about ‘ideals’ and ‘supermen’ 
and ‘abstractions’—because I’ve heard so much talk. 

. . . It’s the first thing I remember. Lying in the 
crib—I began to hear my father’s voice.” 

“But you’ve got all this stuff, Pidge. That’s what 

makes you—makes you-” 

“It is what makes me nothing! It is what keeps me 
from being an honest-to-God mill girl. It is what 
keeps me from everything that means something to 
other mill girls. It is what keeps me from taking 
life as I find it. It’s what spoils me from really know¬ 
ing Miss Claes or Nagar—or what they are about 
—because so many words have been dinned into my 
ears before coming to New York.” 

42 




ENTER, FANNY GALLUP 


The hardest thing on Dicky these days was that 
Pidge had to work in a factory. This thought was never 
far from the central arena of his mind. It chafed and 
irked. There was very little of the philanderer in his 
breed. Mostly, the Cobdens had chosen their women 
carefully, after long, cool, studious courtship. Having 
decided, courted and married, nothing short of death 
could break in. Doubtless Dicky’s fidelity was as stable 
as that of his relatives, even though his heart had not 
turned so cautiously to his light of day. Pidge had 
risen in his heavens and possessed them like the rising 
sun. There were not two suns in his system. 

He had meant to live lean down in Harrow Street, 
but his idea of that wasn’t native to the locality. His 
ramifications for keeping clean were considerable and 
very disturbing to Pidge Musser, who had been brought 
up in Southern California to wear a few white gar¬ 
ments which she could wash herself. Washing was 
impossible in her room, and wasn’t at all easy in the 
hall below where Miss Claes had told her to get her 
water. 

Dicky Cobden was the first gentleman Pidge had ever 
known. She had met several boys with a streak of 
genius showing; boys who had come to her father to 
learn how to write and had taken away something, if 
not that. Practically all those boys had been “on a shoe 
string,” and trained to get along without many things 
that Cobden would have considered actual necessities, 
including an established routine of order and cleanli¬ 
ness in one’s person and quarters. Pidge had also met 
43 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


many of the “queer” ones of Hollywood and vicinity 
—men and women who ate this way and that, bathed 
this way and that, in running waters and still, in sea 
waters and rain waters, in mud and sunlight, using 
unctions and ointments, but they were bathing their 
souls. 

Dicky Cobden bathed frequently, carefully, believ¬ 
ing beyond cavil that New York and the processes of 
life grimed him on the outside, that life itself was 
a constant war against grime, requiring an ever acces¬ 
sible tub, much soap, hot water, changes of clothing, 
laundry bags, rugs, brushes. Not that Dicky gave any 
thought to this. It was as if he supposed everybody 
did the same. Since everybody didn’t and couldn’t; and 
since everybody didn’t have as much money to spend 
for bread and meat and tea, as Mr. Cobden did for 
laundry alone—Pidge was miserably rebellious. 

Always as she sat in the presence of Dicky’s alto¬ 
gether thoughtless freshness; sat in her apple-butter 
colored wool dress which had contained the emotional 
hurl and thresh of the romantic Lance —always Miss 
Musser had a hard time to forget herself and was fre¬ 
quently on the verge of becoming defiant and bad- 
tempered for reasons he didn’t dream. 

She suffered, because every evening almost, Dicky 
invited her out to dine, and not once in four times 
could she pass the frowning negatives of her own 
soul. He chose to regard her as superbly honest and 
unaffected. She really needed those dinners, too. All 
the future novels and heart throbs needed them. 
44 




ENTER, FANNY GALLUP 


Occasionally she met him after dinner for a walk or 
a picture, and once she had been lured to an uptown 
theater. Just once—never again in the brown wool 
dress! 

She felt, as she entered the theater lights that night, 
that she had been betrayed. She felt also like some¬ 
thing Mr. Cobden had found in the street, or that 
she was helping him make good on a first of April bet. 
Pidge hadn’t been to more than three “talking shows” 
in all her nineteen years; to her a show house was a 
place of darkness, except the screen. 

Alone in her room afterward that night, she made a 
great vow: that when the torrent of American dollars 
turned loose on her (as it was bound to some time) 
she would buy outright chests full of lingerie, cabinets 
of hats, shelves of shoes, and a book of orders for 
frocks to be delivered at future dates. She would keep 
clean then if a Santa Ana sandstorm settled on New 
York and lasted a year. 

One raw and cold week-night, Pidge was about done 
up when she reached Harrow Street. She tried to slip 
softly past his hall door, but Dicky was there. 

“Hard day?” he called. 

“Yes,” she said, pushing on. “Everybody’s tired 
and cross the whole length of New York, like a sore 
spine.” 

“You haven’t had dinner?” 

“No, but I don’t think I’ll go out-” 

“Pve been waiting, Pidge. There’s a little place 
near, where I used to come from uptown, thinking it 
45 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


an excursion—just a neighbor of ours now, The Hob 
and Hook, where they make a stew like Dickens tells 
of in the old English inns—smoking in the pot for 
twenty-four hours; and there’s tea for tired folks, and 

no end of scones and honey-” 

“Oh, please-” said Pidge. Then she added stub¬ 

bornly, “No, I’m not going out again to-night.” 

“It is a trifle wintry,” Dicky observed. “We’ll have 
supper here. I’ll go out and get an armful, and Nagar 
will make us a pot of tea. Oh, I say, Pidge, have a 
little thought of somebody else.” 

She weakened. Alone upstairs a minute afterward, 
she lit the gas and stood before the mirror that waved. 

“If I turned loose just once and ate all I wanted, 
he’d never speak to me again!” 





VII 


“THE FREEDOM OF IGNORANCE” 

P IDGE was gone from Harrow Street from seven 
in the morning to seven at night. She had been 
absolutely blurred with fatigue at the end of the 
first days, but her hands were hardening, her back ad¬ 
justing to the monotonous work at the big pasting table. 
She was actually learning like the other girls the trick 
of sinking into a sort of coma for an hour or more at a 
time. Sometimes (as one under the influence of a pry¬ 
ing drug, which opens scenes, as from a past life) she 
would remember the palisades of Santa Monica, the 
ocean pressing its white fringes up against the gray 
sand; tirelessly pressing again and again, but never 
leaving its white lines of foam, unless the water was 
sick from the big sewer of El Segundo. Rarely a sail 
on that great sunny bay, but many wings—pelicans, 
sandpipers, gulls in hundreds, feeding out beyond the 
surf lines, or gathered in conference on the beaten sand 
—three strange and ancient bird types, gathered to¬ 
gether in one vast audience facing the sea. 

This was but one of her pictures. Other times she 
roamed the canyons, Santa Monica and Topango, and 
the cheerful and solitary mesas. . . . “Yes, that same 
creature—Pan Musser,” she once said, half aloud. . . . 
4 7 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


Then she would think of New* York and Miss Claes 
and Richard Cobden; of the book she had actually 
written, and pretty nearly died for, the book around 
which there was a conspiracy of silence. In spite of the 
coma at the pasting table, and the moments of memory 
drift, the stimulated laughter in the washroom, or in 
the half hour for lunch as they heated their tea pails 
over the radiators at noon; in spite of the clatter of tins 
passing from left to right around the big table, and the 
tireless goading of Fanny Gallup’s cheerful boy-talk— 
the brown wool dress contained plentiful hells of the 
human heart. . . . And to-morrow would be Thurs¬ 
day, the next day Friday, the next day Saturday, and 
then sleep, and this was also New York. 

The first Sunday afternoon of March was the after¬ 
noon of the new frock, a cheap little one-piece dress, 
bought on Seventh Avenue, neither wool nor brown. 
It had a tissuey and boxy smell. It was rapturously, 
adventurously new. Pidge had an omen as she put it 
on, that this was a sort of hour of all her life, that never 
another frock would mean quite th$ same. She was 
alone with Miss Claes when Dicky Cobden came for 
her at six, according to a plan made early in the week. 
They were to cross to Staten Island and find an old 
Georgian mammy, whom he knew, somewhere back of 
Stapleton on the wet roads, a mammy who could cook 
chicken and beaten biscuit. 

Dicky seemed only to see her face. A great wonder¬ 
ment came up in Pidge’s heart, not disappointment 
exactly, but a sort of soul-deep wonder, that Dicky 
48 




“THE FREEDOM OF IGNORANCE” 


didn’t appear to see the new frock. Could it be possible 
that a man who managed the details of his own attire 
with such practiced art had never known what she suf¬ 
fered in the brown wool dress, in all that tragedy of 
shabbiness and dirt? Had he really not felt ashamed 
of her that night under the lights in the uptown theater ? 
He turned to her now: 

“You won’t mind, Pidge, just a moment or two, if 
I speak of a little matter to Miss Claes. Oh, I don’t 
mean for you to leave; in fact, I’d rather not. It is just 
a report about a long story that should have been made 
before.” 

Then out of the inmost heart of innocence, Pidge was 
jerked with a crush. Before his next words she realized 
what she must face; she, sitting aside from them in the 
new frock. 

“. . . About that book manuscript,” Dicky went on. 
“I have ordered it sent back to you, Miss Claes— 
doubtless it will be in the post to-morrow. I have read 
it, and John Higgins has read it. We’re both agreed on 
this particular manuscript—that it isn’t for The Public 
Square 

Pidge stared at him like a child being whipped for 
the first time. All that was left of the meaning of the 
book in her own body and mind, and all hope concerning 
it, had suddenly been put to death. But the rest of her 
remained alive in a stupor of suffering; her eyes stared. 
She saw Richard Cobden as never before, saw him as 
a workman; as they saw him in the office. This was a 
bit of week-day that he was showing now, sincerely 
49 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


speaking to Miss Claes, having at length done the best 
he could in regard to the task which she had imposed. 

“The thing is young, Miss Claes/’ he went on. 
“There is fling and fire to it, but its freedom is the 
freedom of ignorance. This love and this sort of man- 
stuff would only do for the great unsophisticated. I’m 
not saying that some publisher couldn’t take hold of it 
and make a go. In fact, I’ve seen stuff like it in covers 
mount up to big sales, but the human male isn’t handled 
in it, Miss Claes. This is sort of a young girl’s dream 
of what men are. They drink and fight and love and die 
and all that, but-” 

“There, there, Mr. Cobden. Don’t try so hard,” 
Miss Claes said laughingly. “I’m sure you’ve given the 
book its chance.” 

But Dicky meant to finish his report. 

“That’s just the point,” he said; “its chance with 
The Public Square is all I’m talking about. This is a 
shopgirl’s book, and there are myriads of shopgirls. 
The Public Square would like to have their patronage; 
yet one pays a price for that. John Higgins—this is 
the best thing that can be said about one of the best men 
I’ve known—John Higgins has never yet consented to 
pay that price.” 

Pidge Musser found her head turning from side to 
side as one who tries to find in which neck muscle a 
troubling lameness lies. She stopped that. She glanced 
up at Cobden, who was pressing on his left glove with 
his bare right hand. Before she turned, she realized 
that Miss Claes’ eyes were waiting for hers. It wasn’t 
50 





“THE FREEDOM OF IGNORANCE” 


pity she saw in them, nor friendship, nor loyalty, nor 
laughter; it was something of each of these, yet some¬ 
thing more. Only one word in English even suggests 
the thing that was pouring upon her through Miss Claes’ 
eyes—and that word is compassion. 

Its power could not find her heart with its healing, 
but it seemed to gather around like a cloak, waiting for 
entrance. Pidge wanted to be alone with Miss Claes 
now. The ache was so deep that she felt it would be 
worth a life if she could go into Miss Claes’ arms and 
break. That was it, an utter break was the only thing 
that could ease this pain. Then she became aware of 
Cobden standing at her side. In a moment he would 
speak. She did not wait for the moment, but arose. 

“Shall we start down toward the ferry?” she asked. 

“Yes, all ready, Pidge.” 

In the silence that followed, Dicky did not seem to 
notice anything wrong. At the door Miss Claes’ hand 
raised and hovered above Pidge’s shoulder, but did not 
touch. Pidge was grateful for that. 




VIII 


SOMEBODY'S SHOULDER 

I T was early April, a dark and rainy afternoon. 
Pidge had been in the tin factory three months. 
For four weeks the manuscript of the Lance had 
lain in the bureau drawer of the little upper room in 
Harrow Street, not being given a second submittal. The 
secret was still kept. Richard Cobden had not spoken 
of the story since his report that Sunday afternoon to 
Miss Claes. There seemed an astonishing cruelty in 
the fact that he could forget. He had spoken of every¬ 
thing else. ... 

Pidge had just left the factory and was running in her 
rubbers through the blur of rain toward a downtown 
subway entrance. A sort of mocking laughter was in 
her ears, “and this is New York,” the burden of it. In 
the dim light of the passage down into the tube she saw 
the gray gleaming patches of wear on the steel steps, 
slippery now from the rain. There was a shudder and 
gasp from a girl beside her; a parting of the hurrying 
ones ahead to avoid clotted pools of blood on two or 
three steps below. 

Farther down in the area, a man lay propped in the 
arms of a stranger. His face was very white. A few 
minutes before he had been hurrying down those steel 
52 


SOMEBODY’S SHOULDER 


steps that the rain had made slippery—hurrying perhaps 
in the same confusion of fatigue and hunger that she 
had known. ... A pause had come to him from all 
that hurry. His white face was more peaceful than any 
of the bystanders. A hospital ambulance clanged above, 
as she lingered. Attendants came down with the 
stretcher. The body of the unconscious man was swept 
up by one of the swift city brooms. The stream of 
ticket buyers filed on as before, the downtown express 
crashed in. 

Pidge sat in her cane seat. The main crowd of the 
city was coming uptown at this hour. At least, she was 
spared that packing. She breathed the dense tired air, 
and recalled that on a night or two before she had 
slipped on the steel stairs, but had not fallen. It was 
borne upon her that in some way this man had fallen 
for her, fallen for every one who saw him or the pud¬ 
dles of blood he left. Every one had walked more care¬ 
fully afterward, reaching for the rails. And he had lost 
the sense of hurry—that unmitigated madness which 
drove them all from dawn to dark. 

Her old wonder of New York came back, as she 
thought that she was being flashed fifty miles an hour 
from the junction at Ninety-sixth Street down to Forty- 
second Street, under the busiest streets and corners of 
America. Mere men could manage much. Then the 
old agony stole in—“the freedom of ignorance.” Surely 
no one had ever been punished for doing a book as she 
had been punished: that it was so poor, as to prove a 
temptation for John Higgins to publish it, because 
53 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


of its chance of falling exactly into the fancy of these 
—the myriad of shop girls in the uptown locals and 
expresses, crashing by in thick ropes of white light. As 
for the public taste, Dicky Cobden had told her that 
John Higgins had confessed, speaking wearily and with 
a smile that had lost its sting of reproach, that for thirty 
years he had been choosing stories for people to read, 
and every year he had been forced to lower his estimate 
as to what the public taste was. Even so, John Hig¬ 
gins had said he was far from the level; that only a 
trade mind could get stories banal enough. But hers 
might interest that public. 

She was so tired. . . .For somebody’s shoulder to 
lean against! Pidge knew what Fanny Gallup felt, 
what the other factory girls felt, when they pushed out 
so brazenly toward men—in very clumsiness from hard 
pressure, spoiling their chances of being treated on the 
square. Yes, she was really learning what the girls felt, 
as they hunted their own in the masses of men they 
passed—how tired, hungry, blurred, unsatisfied their 
hearts—anything to escape the withering grind of the 
mills and the counters and the shops. She knew the 
secret bloom they felt, the terrible brief drive of it— 
childhood, girlhood and youth, all passing like the up¬ 
town trains—a home, a man, a child of their own, the 
one chance for a breath of life. Of course, they talked 
of nothing else, in the closets and dressing rooms, in 
the cars and streets; and read nothing else. Certainly 
their dreams had to come true in books and plays, even 
if they didn’t in life. Life would break the dream soon 
54 




SOMEBODY’S SHOULDER 


enough. The best life could do didn’t compare with the 
lowliest dream; for the dream of a girl has glamour, 
and the life of a woman is stripped. But that was no 
reason why books and plays should tear off the glamour 
ahead of time. 

It wasn’t that Pidge loved shopgirls and mill girls. 
She didn’t love herself for sharing their lot. She wasn’t 
sentimental at all. She recognized bad management 
somewhere that forced her to this work. She had to 
have bread, and outer and under clothing. She paid the 
price, but there was nothing good nor virtuous about it. 
She didn’t hate Dicky Cobden when he spoke of “shop¬ 
girl literature”; she knew how rotten it was, but there 
was something in her that belonged to it, or she wouldn’t 
have been in the factory; moreover, that something had 
helped to write the Lance. 

. . . Somebody’s shoulder. Three months of tin 
cans was teaching that very well. . . . And there was 
a shoulder, straight and steady—a kind of mockery 
about it, because it was so fine. None of the girls at 
the big table where she worked would have asked more. 
It meant books and pictures and all the dining tables of 
New York; plays and dresses, cleanliness, and all the 
little coaxing cushions and covers of this arrogant mod¬ 
ern hour. It meant all the old solid established joys of 
place and plenty; all the writing she liked; a leisurely 
winning of her way through magazines and publishing 
houses; nothing of Grub Street and the conspiracy 
against an unknown outsider. . . . 

And this life of the factory—hadn’t she earned re- 

55 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


lease? What more could come of the grinding monot¬ 
ony of the days but a more passionate agony to escape, 
through the under world, or the upper world, through 
any route at all, even death itself? Was there a further 
lesson than this? . . . Somebody’s shoulder. He had 
the native kindness of clean breeding; also that con¬ 
sideration for others of one who is brought up in a 
large house. He had an ardent interest in books and 
life. He was warmly established in the hearts of other 
men—first and last, a man’s man, which it behooves a 
woman to inquire into. 

There was a tired smile on Pidge’s lips as the car 
halted at Thirty-second street. . . . The only blunders 
he had ever made were in her presence, because he cared 
so much. He seemed continually in awe and wonder 
before the thing he fancied she was, as if he had never 
really looked at a woman before. Of course, another 
man might act that way, but it was different the way 
Dicky did it. He had been at school late, and for 
nearly four years in the office of The Public Square he 
had bored steadily, craftily toward the center of the 
life of letters. Work had been his passion up to that 
day in which he had called to see Nagar, and fell under 
the spell of Miss Claes and Harrow Street. . . . 
There was enough of the artist and dreamer in him to 
keep life from being tame, yet not enough to make life a 
maze and a madness. He had health. Money was to 
him like an old custom, so established as to be for¬ 
gotten. . . . 

Fourteenth Street. Pidge didn’t hear the first call 

56 




SOMEBODY’S SHOULDER 


and hopped off with a rush at the second, pulling a 
growl from the gateman as she sped out. . . . Dicky 
was standing at the head of the stairs on the second 
floor of the Harrow Street house. 

“Hello, Pidge,” he said. 

“Hello,” she answered, pushing past, but he caught 
her arm. 

“Let me go, please! I haven’t washed yet-” 

But he drew her by the hand toward the open door 
to his front room. The brighter light from there 
streamed out into the dim hall. 

“My hands are sticky from the paste. I’ll come back. 
I’d rather come back.” 

“It’s about that—about your hands, Pidge. I’ve 
waited as long as I can.” 

. . . Somebody’s shoulder. She wasn’t safe to be 
trusted right now, yet she couldn’t pull away. If she 
ever got upstairs—-even for a minute in her own little 
place, before the mirror that waved, she would see it all 
clearly, but here and now she didn’t want to see clearly. 
She wanted to give up and rest. She wanted what he 
wanted—wanted to give him what he wanted, which 
was the tiredest, most hopeless girl in New York to¬ 
night. She was dying of all its strains and failures and 
rigidities and fightings, and he wanted to take the load. 

They were standing under the hanging lamp in his 
room. The light was white; his face was white. It 
was leaner than ever before* more of a man in it, more 
of a boy in it. His will was working furiously to make 
him speak. 


57 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


He held her right hand up between them. 

“It’s about your hands, Pidge, about the factory. 
Listen, you make me feel like a tout or a sot—as if you 
were out killing yourself to support me. I’ve been home 
two hours and you just coming in.” 

“There’s half a million girls in New York—just 
coming in.” 

“I know. We’ll get to them later, but now there’s 
only one—only one Pidge. I want her home to stay. I 
want to make a home for her. Why, Pidge, I’ll let you 
alone, if you just let me do that-” 

“I believe you would.” 

She was looking up at him hard. She didn’t fully 
understand, but the boyish cleanliness of him struck her 
fully that moment. The power of his will which she 
felt was mainly the fierceness of his decision to speak. 
It wasn’t the burn of terrible hunger for her. He was 
young as a playmate: that’s what shook her now. He 
wanted to fix her place, to let her hands soften again, 
wanted to let her rest and breathe—not what the other 
girls laughed about. 

“Why, Pidge, I’ve got to take care of you. I’ve got 
to straighten you out—if it’s only to marry you and go 
away.” 

Something in her heart cracked like a mirror, and a 
sob broke out of her. It was as if a car that had been 
running along by itself suddenly left the road and went 
into a cliff—a warm, kind cliff. Somebody’s shoulder, 
and she was sobbing: 


58 




SOMEBODY’S SHOULDER 


“I told you I was so tired! I told you I wasn’t 
safe-” 

“Ah, little Pidge-” he was patting her arm and 

pressing her close. 

It had come. This was it. It was rest. The other 
girls knew. The awful cold ache was broken—warmth 
of life pouring out of her—heavenly ease in the flood 
of tears, and something of the dearness of dreams was 
in his passion, not for her—but to do something for 
her. 

The first whip stroke fell, when Pidge remembered 
how she looked when she cried. But if she could keep 
her face covered! She didn’t stir. ... Was this the 
fullness of days? All the consummate essences of ease, 
he brought—no hunger, no dirt—and really she had 
fought long and hard. 

“. . . Everything you want, Pidge,” he was whisper¬ 
ing. “I’ll take you to my mother. She’s a regular 
sport, Pidge-” 

“She’d have to be,” came from the incorrigible heart 
in his arms, but not aloud. 

The second whip stroke— The Lance of the River- 
nais. She had failed, and the failure wasn’t the book, 
but herself, the thing in his arms. She didn’t stir, but 
there was coldness of calculation to her thinking now— 
that he meant ease and rest and expediency, not the rip¬ 
ping, rioting, invincible man force that was to come one 
day and carry her off her feet. 

This was the third whip stroke: that he meant pro¬ 
pinquity—the nearest, the easiest way. 

59 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


She started up and pushed him from her. 

“I’m not washed,” she said. “I don’t mean from the 
mills. I’m not washed, or I couldn’t have—couldn’t 

have-! I’m just like the rest—dying for a shoulder 

to cry on. You’re all right, Dicky, so right and fine 
that I’m ashamed. I’ll always care for you. I’ll always 
be warm at the thought of you. I’ll always remember 
how I went to you—how dear you are—but you can’t 
give me freedom. You can’t give me peace. My soul 
would rot in ease and peace and plenty. I’ve got to earn 
my own.” 

She looked up into his face and her own took a fright 
from it. 

“I know I’ll suffer hells for hurting you—but I can’t 
help it. I had to know. If I have to spend a life in 
misery—I had to know that there isn’t anything you 
can give that will satisfy-” 

His mouth was partly open, his head twisted pecu¬ 
liarly, and lowered, as if his shoulder and neck were 
deformed. He was shockingly white under the lamp. 

“Oh, I’m such a beast and I’m so sorry. I really 
wanted terribly to stay. . . . But, Dicky Cobden—it 
wasn’t for you. It wasn’t for you that I wanted to stay 
—it was for what you have—more.” 





IX 


“YOU BOTH HAVE KEYS” 

D ICKY kept his quarters in Harrow Street, but 
for days at a time did not appear. Pidge 
Musser at first fancied this was easier. There 
was a faint cackle of derision from somewhere in her 
depths, as this idea of it being easier repeated itself in 
her mind; in fact, there were many conflicting myster¬ 
ies in Pidge’s deep places. “I laid my head on his 
shoulder,” she once said to herself, “but thought better 
of it. Now we are to be strangers.” 

At unexpected moments when she was busy at the 
pasting bench; or nights and mornings, passing in and 
out of sleep, the faint note of mockery would sound. 
When she passed Dicky in the halls, or met him at one 
of Miss Claes’ little tea parties, and he would bow dis¬ 
tantly or indulge in formal commonplaces, the mockery 
would stir itself in Pidge’s profundities, indicating that 
something somewhere was decidedly idiotic. He looked 
positively diminished as he kept up his formalities, and 
she liked and respected him too much to feel pleasant 
about this. She heard that he was interested in Africa. 
It was to be observed that he sought Nagar; in fact, 
several times she heard these two together through the 
partition. 

61 


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Finally Pidge heard that Dicky was going to South 
Africa, possibly to hunt up Nagar’s Little Man, whose 
name was Gandhi, and who had been Nagar’s friend 
and teacher both in India and Natal. Also Dicky was 
to do some letters for The Public Square. 

On the night before he was to sail for the Mediter¬ 
ranean, he was invited with Pidge by Miss Claes for 
dinner at Tara Subramini’s Punjabi Fireplace down on 
Sixth Avenue near Fourth Street. This was also the 
night Pidge smelled Spring in New York for the first 
time. 

Mid-April; there had been rain. Pidge hadn’t caught 
the Spring magic coming home from the factory, but 
now as they walked down Sixth Avenue under the mo¬ 
mentary crashes of the Elevated—it stole up out of the 
pavements as if she were in a meadow—that untellable 
sweetness which seems the breath of Mother Nature 
herself, a breath made of all the perfumes of all the 
flowers, without accentuating one, and a sublimation of 
all the passions of the human heart as well. Her left 
hand burrowed under the hanging sleeve of Miss Claes’ 
wrap. The bare elbow there closed upon it. They both 
laughed, and Mr. Richard, walking sedately, was alto¬ 
gether out of the question. 

Tara Subramini served her Punjabi dinners on great 
individual plates which were none too hot. She dis¬ 
cussed modern dancing with Miss Claes at easy length, 
when Pidge was served and Richard Cobden was not. 
The rice cooled, the lamb cooled, even if the peppery 
curry held its fire. The vast plate had curious little 
62 




“YOU BOTH HAVE KEYS” 


crevices on the side for conserves and glutinous vege¬ 
tables and various watery leaves. Pidge became preju¬ 
diced at once against the Punjab. The great leisure 
of Asia, which she had heard about from a child and 
which had tempted her alluringly in the more intense 
pressures of her own life, lost something of its charm 
as Tara Subramini conversed with all concerned and the 
contents of the troughs congealed. 

Food is food, but talk is merely talk. Besides, Pidge 
was hungry. Subramini had things to say, but also an 
oriental delight in the use of English. Mr. Cobden was 
unreservedly courteous. Pidge always wondered if he 
really knew what hunger was. She could get so hungry 
that her hands trembled, and New York had shown her 
deeper mysteries of the hunger lesson that she would be 
slow to forget. 

“It must be great to be a gentleman,” she thought. 

She positively yearned for Dicky to wake up. If this 
were poise, this moveless calm of his, this unvarying 
quiet and courtesy, this inability to be stretched even in 
laughter—Pidge felt she was ready to drop the hunt; 
also she was tempted to test out Dicky’s poise to see 
how much it could really stand. . . . India bored her, 
as well as America. Miss Claes could eat and talk at 
the same time, and drop neither words nor food. . . . 
A lone Hindu arose to depart from another table. Sub¬ 
ramini helped him with his coat and followed him to 
the door. Pidge thought once that Subramini was 
about to spread herself on the doorstep and let him walk 
over her. Punjab didn’t rise in her regard. Pidge 

63 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


suddenly burst out into a kind of merriment that had 
nothing to do with anybody present. 

“It is because we’re such idiots!” she said brokenly. 
“Oh, I don’t mean you, Miss Claes. I mean myself and 
— Mr. Cobden. It is the way things are done in the 
world—so utterly silly. Why should we be strange and 
embarrassed, avoiding each other for days and weeks— 
when we should be more than ever friends, and-” 

Richard Cobden bent forward attentively. Pidge 
was turned from him. 

“You don’t mean, Pidge, that you fail to see a reason 
for this strangeness?” Miss Claes asked. “You-” 

Pidge stared at her a second in surprise. 

“There can’t be any sense to it, can there?” she said 
slowly. 

The other regarded her with a calm that irritated 
Pidge just now. Everything irritated her, Dicky sit¬ 
ting by, Miss Claes’ familiarity with Subramini, and the 
look of knowing and not speaking, back of the smile 
on Miss Claes’ lips. But most of all, peculiarly at this 
moment, arose in Pidge’s mind the two conflicting 
stories of nationality. 

“Did I hear you wrongly that you said you were 
English, Miss Claes?” she asked abruptly. 

“No, dear.” 

“But Dicky said you told him you were Hindu-” 

“I did. I am both. I am half-caste, supposed to unite 
in myself the worst of English and Indian.” 

Pidge burned with contrition, less at her questioning 

64 






“YOU BOTH HAVE KEYS” 


than at the bad temper that prompted it. The two 
women were ready to go, but Dicky wasn’t. 

“You seemed to have something to say, Miss Claes, 
to set us—to set me straight on all this,” he began. 

“You see, Richard, one cannot speak without being 
drawn in. I hesitated on that account.” 

“But I’d like to hear.” 

Pidge flushed a little as she watched him. Tara Sub- 
ramini, still afar off, was engaged in words. 

“. . . My house in Harrow Street is just a symbol,” 
Miss Claes was saying. “To come into one’s house 
really should mean to come into one’s heart. You both 
have keys. . . . What was in my mind to say was that 
people in your trouble act as strangers for good reasons. 
If they cannot have each other—they sometimes rush 
to the other extreme to save themselves the pain of 
watching another come between.” 

Dicky Cobden essayed to light a cigarette. The 
match broke in his fingers. He did not try again. Miss 
Claes amplified without apparent feeling: 

“Sometimes one who cannot have what he wants— 
gives way to hatred for a time to ease his wound. . . . 
Pidge, what have you to give for the friendship and 
association of one who wants more?” 

“I don’t know that I have anything. I see how selfish 
I was. It came to me that we, of all people, should be 
friends, but I didn’t look at the other side.” 

“You can be friends, if you are brave enough. You 
can be, if you dare to come and go and set each other 
free utterly, but that means long and bitter work.” 

65 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


The harrowing thing to Pidge was that Miss Claes 
talked as if Dicky and herself were one in condition and 
purpose and dilemma, when in reality all the hard part 
seemed to go to him. She wished Miss Claes would 
stop, but the words continued with a smooth predes¬ 
tined force: 

“The best the world knows, even in books and art, 
is the kingdom of two; but love doesn’t end in that— 
at least, not for those who are brave enough and strong 
enough to sunder their tight little kingdom of each other 
and let the earth rush in between. ...” 

Tara Subramini’s slippered feet crept in. She stood 
behind Miss Claes’ shoulders and began to speak of a 
book of poetic obituaries. The paying of the bill seemed 
an interminable process. 

Cobden looked dazed. 

“If Pidge thinks it’s silly to act as strangers—and 
I can see that it is—I’m for trying the other way,” he 
repeated, when they reached the street. 

The whole talk had been subject to most stubborn 
and perverse distractions. On Sixth Avenue the racket 
of traffic had become incessant. Apparently Miss Claes 
had decided to say no more. Callers waited for her in 
the basement room at Harrow Street, so Pidge followed 
Dicky to his “parlor,” which she had not entered since 
the night of Somebody’s Shoulder. 

He seemed possessed to talk of what he had heard, 
as a youth fascinated by a new course to take. He spoke 
of a man being big enough to stand by and set a woman 
free; of a man big enough to wait and watch and be 
66 




“YOU BOTH HAVE KEYS” 


a friend, a comrade. And Pidge, who had brought it 
all about, listened in a sort of terror which only a woman 
could understand. This thing which she had aroused in 
him, this answer of his deep, but still vague powers, to 
her thoughtless challenge, frightened her now that it 
had come. 

“Don’t, oh, don’t let’s talk any more!” she said at 
last. “It’s talk, Dicky, just talk. The doing is differ¬ 
ent, the doing is harder! What do we know of what 
life will fix for us to do day by day through the years? 
This thing is so hard that Miss Claes herself hated to 
let it out. It belongs to you differently than it belongs 
to me. I haven’t anything to give for your friendship 
and association. I mean you’ll always want more than 
I can give.” 

He looked at her steadily for an instant. 

“I don’t want to be strangers again, Pidge. I want 
to stand by and wait.” 

“You won’t know better than to build pictures while 
you wait. No one would. You will wait—while you’re 
away in Africa, making pictures about me, pictures of 
what I am not! I don’t know why I’m chosen to hurt 
you. If I hadn’t been so utterly lost in myself, I never 
could have brought this on. I feel that I’ve started a 
new set of conditions to bring you to another moment— 
another gash—like in this room the last time we were 
here. And oh, Dicky Cobden, I don’t want to! To be 
strangers! To be common and hateful and avoid each 
other is so much more simple and easy.” 

“I’ll stop talking, Pidge,” he said quietly. “It may 

67 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


be easier to be strangers, but it doesn’t look rosy to me. 
Don’t you worry about it. It is my job and I’ll take 
a chance.” 

“You don’t know what you’re saying!” 

“Perhaps not. We won’t talk about that any more. 
. . . Now, Pidge, I’m keeping these rooms while I’m 
away. Wouldn’t you—wouldn’t you for me—look 
after them—look in on them and keep them alive while 
I’m gone? ... It would make me feel like—great, 
you know.” 




X 


APRIL BREATHES AGAIN 

T HREE nights later, when she reached Harrow 
Street from the factory, Pidge found two let¬ 
ters. One was from John Higgins of The 
Public Square. This she opened first. 

... At the suggestion of Mr. Cobden, just before 
he left for South Africa, I am offering you a position 
here as reader of the unsolicited manuscripts. Mr. 
Cobden hints that you know enough about The Public 
Square to realize we cannot be lavish in salaries, but 
think we can at least pay you what you are getting 
now, to begin with—and the work will be different. 

“Oh, Dicky Cobden,” she whispered, alone in the 
upper room. 

She sat in the center of her cot as of old, breathing 
the sweetness of the release from the factory. . . . 
Friendliness like this art of Dicky’s was good. ... It 
made her eyes smart now—the new work. It was easier 
to take it from him—away. It was a soft cloak that she 
could nestle in, because he wouldn’t see. . . . Miss 
Claes knocked. Pidge read in her eyes that she already 
knew. 


69 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“No one can ever tell you anything.” 

“I’m so glad you want it, Pidge. I couldn’t tell 
him for sure that you’d take it.” 

“They really need somebody, don’t they?” 

“Mr. Cobden said you wouldn’t be in doubt about 
that after you got there.” 

“I’m going to take it,” Pidge said soberly. “I know 
it means something more than it looks—but I’m going 
to take it. I’m so sick of myself which fights every¬ 
thing. Also, I’m going down after supper—and sit 
there—in his 'parlor.’ I haven’t entered since-” 

Miss Claes was called from below. Pidge felt the 
second letter in her hand. It was from Los Angeles, 
her father’s writing. A check dropped out on the 
cot. By powerful effort of will, Pidge left it there, 
until she had read the note: 

... At this time it seems well for me to send you 
money. Hard as it has been for me to refrain, I felt 
before this that it was best for you to face New York 
alone, unaided. As there is a New Generation, my 
child, there is a New Fatherhood which dares—dares 
even to allow the heart’s darling to struggle alone; dares 
to say “hands off” to all the untransmuted emotions 
which rush forth to shield the fledgling from the 
world- 

Fifty dollars. Pidge sank back and softly batted 
her pillow with one loose arm. She laughed in a 
smothery uncertain way that was not of joy. . . .It 
was as if she heard his voice in the room—the new 
70 






APRIL BREATHES AGAIN 


parenthood, the new generation, the adjustment of 
motive to moment! 

The sort of thing in this letter always shook and 
tortured Pidge. It was a part of her. She was bred 
of it. She had been half as old as now when she 
first realized it. Then in every thought and act, she 
had rushed to the other extreme. It was true that 
her father had taught her the deepest things in books. 
In his study, she had caught hints of the inner mean¬ 
ings of inaccessible literatures, before she had learned 
to spell simple words of English. Because his eyes 
hurt, she had read aloud for hours, day after day, tomes 
out of Asia which she had no care nor thought to 
understand, but from which, volatile fairylike im¬ 
pressions came to rest in the depths of her heart. She 
had loved the few central springs of books in a house 
of books, until she realized that her father read, but 
lived them not; that he expounded, exhorted upon the 
doctrines—but his life was his own twisted rag. That 
was when Pidge’s heavens cracked—and she had set 
out to be honest and erect, if only as tall as a gnome. 

The thought that came at this moment had come 
before. It was the passion to be what her father was 
not that had made her rush forth to be straight in 
her own head—to refuse to lie to herself—to go to 
the other extreme of fierceness and bleakness and ill- 
temper, rather than lie to herself—to be plain and true, 
if she had to be a man-hater and poison face. Yet 
Pidge sat up straight with a bitter thought. Like it 
or not, she saw right now that it was her father who 
7i 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


had prepared her to accept and make good, possibly, 
in this position with The Public Square. . . . 

“But where did he get the money?” she muttered 
at last. 

She crossed to the open window. April breathed 
up to her from the stone floor of the area to-night; 
magic April, breathing up through the trampled earth 
and the degraded pavements. Suddenly a soft love 
stole over her. It was love of the April dark. 

She heard the sounds of the city over the buildings, 
over into the stillness of Harrow Street, like the far 
tread and clatter of a pageant. Mother Nature was 
actually perceptible in this soft air, and something that 
Pidge answered to as never before in New York. Her 
hands stretched out to touch the casings of the win¬ 
dow; the old wood gave her an additional warmth. 
It belonged to this house of Miss Claes, this house 
of the mystery of kindness. She was free at this 
moment of the fear of accepting too much, having 
come up to breathe, at least, out of the ruck of fighting 
everything and everybody. She had been utterly grace¬ 
less and narrow in her acceptances, fighting against 
favors, when she knew all the time that to receive is 
the other part of giving. A shiver passed over her, 
nevertheless, as she remembered the subtle mendicancy 
that she had known in her father’s house, the calm 
acceptance of gifts and favors from others in the belief 
that one was evolved enough to give the ineffable in 
exchange for materials. No wonder she had run from 
that. 


72 



APRIL BREATHES AGAIN 


This of Miss Claes’ was a house with a heart. This 
was her house. She could breathe in it now, at least, 
for a little. The numbness and dumbness of the factory 
had fallen away. The softness stole over her toward 
Fanny Gallup and the other girls who must still stay at 
the bench. She would never forget. She had earned an 
understanding of them, and had been released; released 
was the word. But something would carry her back 
to them one day, something born in that slow madness 
of monotony. 

She crossed the room and opened the door into the 
hall. Supper smells came up to her, the murmur of 
voices behind the shut doors. The prima donna person 
was singing, not practicing this time, but singing. . . . 
“One comes up through great tribulation to learn to 
sing,” Miss Claes had once said, “and others share it.” 

The warmth stole into her from the halls. Every¬ 
body was hungry to-night, the spring hunger, and 
everybody celebrated, as a festival. April seemed 
breathing in the halls, too. April was breathing in 
herself; that was why she was awake to this outer 
delight. If she could only keep it. It would always 
be in externals, if she could only keep this springtime 
alive within. She laughed a little bitterly. Of course, 
she was elated because the factory had dropped away, 
because the new position had opened, because the check 
had come (though she felt something queer about that), 
because Richard Cobden and Miss Claes were fashioned 
of unswerving kindnesses, which she suddenly realized 
as never before. 


73 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“It’s money and place, and I’m ‘falling for’ it, ven¬ 
turing to be pleased with myself-” She laughed 

again. “But, oh, it is so cheerful, so restful to feel 
New York like this, just for to-night!” 




XI 


THE BABY CARRIAGE 

P IDGE read manuscripts in the office of The 
Public Square . She saw them first. The large 
part of them were seen by no one else. It was 
like being a telephone girl in a way, dipping into the 
secrets of a thousand houses. But it was much more 
subtle than that; the secrets more soulful and revela¬ 
tory. She saw the hopelessness of life. She saw love, 
hopelessly uninviting love—puppy love, and much of 
the *‘kidding” clever love that is made in America, and 
proud of itself for that. But over all, there seemed an 
anguish on the part of male and female, old and young, 
to express. Before her were secrets of those dying 
for expression; in her hands, the progeny. She loathed 
the desire everywhere, because she had the same desire 
herself. 

Every one who wrote and submitted stories and 
manuscripts had a “front.” In the personal letters, 
accompanying their stories and articles and poems, they 
told matters about themselves which their manuscripts 
did not. They knew this one and that; they had in¬ 
fluential friends who had said this and that about their 
writing. Parlorfuls of friends “had been quite carried 
away by the inclosed.” . . . Others hadn’t wanted to 
75 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


write. They had rebelled long; even as Saul, they had 
kicked against the pricks; but for the good of others, 
for the message it would carry to the world, they had 
given in at last and written their story which was 
inclosed. . . . “This is a true story,” one personal letter 
accompanying said. . . . “This story may be finished 
differently,” another wrote. “I have thought out a 
happy ending, if the public is not ready to stand this 
human one.” . . . Here was a sales manager who wrote 
his personal letter with a jovial laugh: “I have just 
tossed these few experiences into a story which my 
friends insist belongs to you. ... I wouldn’t think 
of it, but I can’t help seeing what a rotten lot of stuff 
the magazines publish!” . . . This one had decided 
to write stories because she was a widow and had no 
other means of support, and had heard that writing was 
“the pleasantest of professions.” . . . And here was 
one who had sent in story after story to rejection for 
six years. “Some time I will win,” came the thin 
tired cry. 

Pidge had fatigued her body in the mill. She tired 
her heart in the office of The Public Square, reaching 
Harrow Street with something in her breast all sore 
and shamed. This was the queer strenuous part—the 
shame of it all. She, too, had fallen into expressing 
herself, and they had been kind. Miss Claes had been 
kind and she knew. But Dicky Cobden and John 
Higgins had been kind, though they hadn’t known the 
author of the Lance. (They would never know.) 
76 




THE BABY CARRIAGE 


They had said that the writer had the fine freedom of 
youth—“the freedom of ignorance.” 

Pidge knew even better now what that meant. She 
saw ther freedom of ignorance in the rape of many 
type machines. . . . The worst of it was, she her¬ 
self wasn’t through. She knew the time would come 
when a new story would form within her, and begin 
its knocking for life. . . . And this was New York, 
the market place; and John Higgins sat near, and al¬ 
ways he held his face nearer the manuscripts toward 
the end of. the days, his eyes more tired and dim in the 
late hours. . . . 

“Miss Musser,” he called one afternoon at the end 
of the first month. “I wish you would go out and see 
what this Rufus Melton really has to say. We took a 
story of his some months ago. We had great hopes 
for him, but now he’s sent in a raft of junk. Kid stuff, 
this must be, he’s trying to work off. I don’t feel 
like seeing him right now.” 

In the reception room, a young man arose to meet 
her, as she spoke the name, “Mr. Melton.” It was 
a face you would expect to see on one of the cars of 
Hollywood Boulevard, among the movie plants. There 
was a catch in Pidge’s throat as she said: 

“Mr. Higgins asked me to tell you he was occupied, 
Mr. Melton. His report will go to you in a day or two.” 

He was looking down at her, the young man who 
had written the little twisted fury of a tale called Dr. 
Filter, which Dicky had brought to Harrow Street for 
her to read. She sensed that he regarded her as an 
77 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


office girl, not as a reader. He couldn’t have been 
more than twenty-three or four. He knew that her 
words portended an evil fate for his present offerings. 
It was not hurt alone in his eyes, but rage, too. 

Now Pidge’s mind whirled back to a pair of eyes 
in a baby carriage at Santa Monica; eyes of a male 
infant, said to be the handsomest of that locality where 
the hills and mesas break off abruptly for a sea wall. 
Large, still, steady blue-black eyes of an actor that 
had become calm because they were used to seeing 
faces wilt before them; long, curving coal-black lashes. 
Pidge hadn’t liked them in the infant; at least, they 
roused her unpleasantly somehow; and she didn’t like 
them now. The resemblance was deeper and more 
essential than that of family, but what held Pidge really 
was something she recognized, or fancied she did, some¬ 
thing that had to do with being broke and threatened 
with hunger in New York. His clothing was fine, but 
had been long used. She had a positive divination for 
poverty. 

Now his gaze was lost in her hair, as if he found 
hope there. Story failures and New York, fear, and 
its tough core of hunger, these amounted to one thing 
—but red hair was another. The astonishing part was 
the constant changing of expressions in his eye. They 
reflected every mood and whim of him, for one who 
could read; that is, when he forgot to veil them for 
purposes of his own. Just now he seemed to be wonder¬ 
ing if he had better go any further with this red hair 
—if he had time to play. He didn’t seem to consider 

78 




THE BABY CARRIAGE 


whether Pidge wanted to play or not, only whether the 
game were worth the while of one whose law was not 
to let any real chance slip. Pidge had forgotten the 
hurt of her message from John Higgins. She had 
a pronounced feeling that she wanted to hurt Melton 
some way herself. . . . 

“So I can’t see Mr. Higgins?” 

“He’s been unusually rushed to-day.” 

He laughed a little bitterly as if he understood all 
that. “Are you—are you his secretary?” 

“No, an under reader.” 

“I see. Have you been through any of my stuff?” 

Pidge glanced at him resentfully; she felt he wouldn’t 
have asked such a question of a man. 

“This is a sort of show-down with me,” he went 
on. “Pm leaving New York. I really hoped to see 
Mr. Higgins.” 

His dilemma seemed real. It pulled her out from 
herself. 

“I’m sorry-” 

“Perhaps you—I’d have to know before to-morrow,” 
he said jerkily. “Perhaps you’d look at another story 
just finished? If you would read it—there is just a 
chance you might want to get it to Mr. Higgins before 
I go.” 

“Have you the story with you?” 

“No. I was hoping for good word from one of 
the others first. This new one is my last wallop. Might 
I bring it to you, anywhere you say, this evening?” 

79 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“You may leave it with Miss Claes at 54 Harrow 
Street.” 

“Are you Miss Claes?” 

“No, but she will give it to me.” 

“Could I call later in the evening also, for your an¬ 
swer? It is only four or five thousand words.” 

“You know, my reading is merely—I mean Mr. 
Higgins would have to decide.” 

“But it would help—if the story pleased you—help 
to pass the night!” 

“You may leave it with Miss Claes at the basement 
entrance and call a little later.” 

Pidge found herself walking on tiptoe back to her 
desk, the catch still in her throat. 




XII 


UNDER THE SAME LAMP 

T HE manuscript was delivered while Pidge was 
out to supper. She took it upstairs to 
Cobden’s “parlor” and read with a nervous 
interest, and an uncomfortable feeling that Rufus 
Melton was looking down at her all the time. She 
didn’t lose herself in the story, but the feeling persisted 
that she might have done so, another time—especially if 
the manuscript had come to her in the usual way at 
the office. Certainly it was different and distinctive, 
compared to the run of the unsolicited. It was artful, 
if not art. . . . She heard Nagar’s quiet steady step 
as he passed up to his room. She had an impulse to 
ask him to read, but he wouldn’t say anything. Any¬ 
way, he was gone now. 

This was a story of the Tunisian sands, written, she 
decided, by one who hadn’t been there; one who saw 
the desert as the average American reader would expect, 
but with additional flatfooted bits of color tramped 
down with audacity. Moonlight was different in 
Tunisia, and morals were different—freer than here. 
There was the glitter of the snake’s eye through the 
pages, for Pidge Musser. It made her think of a sick 
man in a gorgeous robe. 


81 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


She had inferred from Melton’s talk that this story 
was new; in fact, that it was still hot from his machine. 
Yet the manuscript didn’t feel new; the front and back 
pages showed wear. Could she have misunderstood? 
. . . It had freedom; not the freedom of ignorance, 
but the freedom of a drifting ship. Its anchor dragged, 
its compass was uncentered. It cried out, “My God, 
I am free!” and it was, as a derelict is free. 

At a quarter of ten, she heard the bell in the base¬ 
ment hall; heard Miss Claes directing Melton to the 
next floor. Pidge would not have had it this way, 
but people of the house were in the basement. He 
came up out of the dim stairway, walking wide, his 
soft cap crumpled in his hand, elbows out. He must 
have learned her name from Miss Claes. 

“You mustn’t think, Miss Musser, that I don’t know 
how much I am asking—this favor of yours to-night.” 

There was a sort of lift and draw to the way he 
took her hand; at the same time his shoulders and 
head bent down upon her. This thing that he was 
playing to-night was college boy—clumsy subtlety of 
a big boy coming home and greeting his sister—seeing 
in her, at the moment of greeting, something of the 
charm other boys might see. He walked around her 
under the light, laughing, apologizing, making a 
humorous picture of his own tension at The Public 
Square that afternoon. 

“I went there like an anarchist,” he laughed. “I was 
prepared to get my answer or blow up the place. I had 
to laugh afterwards the way I seized upon you.” 

82 




UNDER THE SAME LAMP 


“I read the Tunis story,” she said. “Of course, you 
know it’s really unimportant what I think. I liked 
it well enough, but wasn’t carried away. I felt the 
color; in fact, color is the main asset of the story, but 
it seemed a bit thick-” 

He laughed aloud. He was bending to her again, 
and most benignly, college big brother still in his man¬ 
ner and voice. 

“I could tone that down, of course. The trouble is 
to get a thing like that straight, when you know that 
part of Africa as I do. I ought to have kept off Tunis, 
that’s the truth of it.” 

“You have really been there?” 

“That’s the worst of it, Miss Musser,” he laughed. 
“I went through hell for that story. Too much feeling 
to write with, you understand.” 

Pidge was awed at her own error. She had been so 
convinced that the color was faked that she had judged 
the whole story on that basis. 

“I’ve already asked too much of you. I’m sorry,” 
he added ingenuously. “One can’t force his things 
through this way. Why, I’d have given the whole six 
stories to The Public Square for a hundred dollars, 
and taken the cheapening that comes to an author from 
a trick like that. That’s how I needed an answer.” 

He had glanced up at the light as he spoke, a white, 
haggard smile, that bloodless look around the mouth. 
Pity caught and controlled her. She had done him an 
injustice already. 


83 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“You spoke of leaving New York for the west,” 
she said. 

He laughed and shrugged, palms held upward. 

“How far? I mean where is your home?” 

He pointed to his cap lying on the arm of a chair, 
as if to say that were his home. 

“I’ve got an aunt in Cleveland who wants me,” he 
added. “A little quiet house away out on one of the 
cross streets off Euclid, where there’s a room and eats 
and a place to write. I’ll start to walk, I guess.” 

“Where are you staying in New York?” 

He was laughing at her. “A little den up in Union 
Square—just a skylight. It’s a cell, Miss Musser, and 
even there, I have to stay out until midnight to sneak 
in without meeting the landlady. . . . Did you ever 
sleep in a room that had no window?” 

“Mine has a window,” Pidge said. 

“Then this isn’t yours?” He pointed to the closed 
folding doors of the inner room. 

“Oh, no. Mine’s up higher, but it has a window. 
This is just a sitting room we sometimes use—Miss 
Claes and I—the lodger being away.” 

“Oh,” he said queerly; then added with his haggard 
smile: “So the color was put on too thick—that’s 
too bad.” 

“Does Mr. Higgins know that you have been over 
there in Tunis?” Pidge asked. 

“I figured he would, but maybe he will decide, as 
you did, that I sat here in New York and stabbed at 
that setting.” 


84 



UNDER THE SAME LAMP 


“I’ll place the story before him to-morrow. I could 
say to him that you’ve been to the desert-” 

“Oh, I wouldn’t. Don’t tell him that. I was hoping, 
though, that you could tell him you liked it.” 

Pidge now looked up into a smile almost childlike 
in its eager purpose. 

“Couldn’t you tell him that? Couldn’t you tell him 
that—just for what others may find in the story?” 

The catch was in her throat again. His hand rested 
lightly upon her shoulder; his smile was altogether dis¬ 
arming in its wistfulness. She thought he couldn’t 
mean what he said. She thought of the face in the baby 
carriage in Santa Monica; of this tortured child of 
whims and imaginations, in a room with no window, 
and the pallor around his mouth. She didn’t like any 
of it, but did not feel exactly separate from it. She 
thought of a little box upstairs in her own room, of 
the check her father had sent, which she had so far 
refused to cash. She was in a blur, her sense of belong¬ 
ing to Melton’s dilemma over all. 

“You can’t mean for me to tell Mr. Higgins what 
I don’t believe,” she said. “I’ll ask him to read the 
story to-morrow. It he’s against it, I could—I might 
help you to pay for the room in Union Square, or 
—enough to get to Cleveland.” 

Then the thing happened which she would have 
apprehended, except for her pity and personal involve¬ 
ment in his trouble. She was drawn in between the 
open flaps of his coat, and held there against the soft 
shirt which he wore. And all through her were his 

85 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


whispers—soft delighted laughter from lips that pressed 
into her hair and cheeks, searching for hers. 

She had finally pushed him from her, and they stood 
apart under the lamp. For a moment, they stared. 
Then it seemed as if he studied her, as one who sud¬ 
denly revalues, doubles the value of an object. It was 
the queerest, intensest scrutiny, his head cocked to one 
side, the light and laughter returning to his eyes and 
lips. 

“I knew I wasn’t safe to come here,” he said. “I 
knew if you did like the story, I wasn’t safe to hear 
the verdict. It was the idea of getting enough money 
to escape from that room, to get back into Cleveland 
and find myself-” 

Still she stared at him. 

“I don’t suppose you can ever forgive me, but it 
broke me wide open, Miss Musser — to find what a 
ripping sport you are!” 

“That’s about enough words,” she said. 

He looked down. 

“To-morrow,” she went on in a dreary tone, “you 
may come here—I mean to the basement entrance, at 
seven in the evening, and I’ll tell you Mr. Higgins’ 
decision. If it’s against the story, I’ll do as I said 
about your room rent and the fare to Cleveland.” 

His hands went out to her. 

“After what I did—you still want to do that?” 

“Yes, and now please go.” 

Pidge was up in her own room minutes afterward, 
before she realized that it had happened under that 
white lamp of Cobden’s “parlor.” 




XIII 


“MOTHER” 

“ MAN’S a fool before he learns technic,” 

/-\ John Higgins said, as he leaned back from 
a manuscript the next afternoon. “He’s 
a cripple while he’s learning it. When he’s learned it 
and forgotten he’s learned it—he begins to be a work¬ 
man. That’s the freedom of knowledge. ... As for 
this Tunis story of young Melton’s—it’s a subtle sort 
of botch.” 

Rufus Melton came to the basement entrance at seven. 
Even if Miss Claes had not gone out to dinner, Pidge 
would not have taken him upstairs. He looked older, 
his back had a curious droop. He glanced at her rue¬ 
fully, and around the room. Pidge stood beside the 
table. 

“Mr. Higgins didn’t care for your story,” she said. 
“It has happened unluckily all around.” 

His head had bowed before she began to speak. 
His eyes came up to her now, full of contrition and 
pain. 

“I think the hardest thing I ever did was to come 
here to-night. Only one thing made it possible. I’d 
have started west, only New York is a curious old 
dump.” 


87 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“How is that?” she asked warily. 

“You have to go north to go west. I mean the 
only way out is north, for a pedestrian.” 

“You haven’t enough for the ferry or tube?” 

Their eyes met. 

“What I said last night holds good, you know,” she 
said with effort. 

He turned slowly to the door as if in indecision, and 
Pidge watched. She knew she could make him take the 
money, but she wanted him to be ready to die first. 

“There was nothing in the other stories, either— 
from Higgins’ point of view?” he asked. 

Pidge was white. She felt like an executioner. “The 
package was mailed back to you to-day.” 

For just an instant his head was bowed again, half 
turned to the door. Then he veered around and his 
hand came out to hers. 

“Good night,” he said. 

“Good night. But you—that quiet room in Cleve¬ 
land-” 

He shook his head with a slow, dawning smile. 

“It’s great to know you. I’ve heard about such 
people being here in the Village, but it’s—‘It’s fourteen 
miles from Schenectady to Troy/ ” 

“It’s a long way to Albany before that,” she said. 

“It’s a long way to One-Hundred-and-Tenth Street, 
Miss Musser, but it is easier than taking money from 
a girl.” 

She breathed relief. “I came to fight it out here in 

88 





“MOTHER” 


New York on the same terms you did,” she said. “You 
can pay me back.” 

Now his back was toward her, his face uplifted. 
She saw his hand grope for the knob of the door, 
and his shoulders rock weakly. She caught his arm 
and pulled him back to a chair. 

“You see, you really couldn’t get away.” 

He had suffered her to lead him to a dining-room 
chair, and sat very still, his head tilted back, eyes closed. 
She took the little package of bills from her dress and 
tucked it into his hand. There were voices in the hall; 
a vague frown crossed his white temples. 

“What is it?” he said queerly. 

“You are faint. I’ll go with you to a near place 
for something to eat. That’s all you need. Come— 
if you can walk a little way.” 

He stood in a sort of confusion, holding the folded 
bills in his hand as one would hold a card. 

“Put that in your pocket,” she said, but he did not 
seem to comprehend. 

They were in the street, her hand steadying him. 
They found a dim restaurant with a counter and a 
few tables. Pie did not speak until the waiter came; 
then asked for coffee. Pidge had taken the money 
and thrust it into his coat pocket. Now she was tor¬ 
mented with the fear that he would lose the small roll, 
not knowing that he had it. She had not brought her 
own purse. He would be forced to pay; then he would 
have to see what he had. 

He drank the coffee first, then ate sparingly. 

89 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“I learned that in the desert,” he said at last. 

“Learned what, please?” 

“Not to go mad over the taste of food when one 
has been without.” 

The girl who waited on the table looked devotedly 
into Melton’s profile as she served. Twice as he started 
to speak, the Sixth Avenue elevated crashed by out¬ 
side and he seemed to forget what he meant to say. It 
seemed more true here in the restaurant than it had been 
in the house in Harrow Street, that he was wonderfully 
good to look upon. The realization held a small tumult 
for Pidge. She was altogether different with him than 
with any one else. They had finished, and still he 
lingered. 

“I’m sorry. I hadn’t intended to come out. I left 
my bag upstairs. Will you please pay ?” 

To his illness, a look of embarrassment was now 
added. 

“It’s in your pocket. Right there-” 

She pointed to his coat, and he drew out the bills 
wonderingly. 

“Oh, I remember,” he said dully. 

While the waitress was away bringing the change, 
he shoved the rest of the money across the table to 
Pidge, but she pushed it back, saying quietly: 

“I want you to fix up the room rent and get a night 
train west. We’ll say no more.” 

His lips whitened under a curious tightening. 

“Let’s get out in the dark,” he said roughly. 

They walked back to Eighth Street and over to the 
90 




“MOTHER” 


Avenue, entering the Square that way. The sooty grass 
was soft and damp; the faintest trace of fog among 
the trees. 

“You’ve got something on me,” he was saying 
strangely. “You’re not like a girl, but like a woman 
and a pal, too. You had something on me last night, 
or I wouldn’t have fallen for you that way.” 

“When you get back to that Cleveland room—per¬ 
haps a real story will come of all this.” 

“A real story,” he repeated. 

His eyes were bright and the pallor of his face in¬ 
tense enough to be visible. She was conscious of his 
inimitable charm as his head inclined to her and she 
heard his words in the lowest possible tone: 

“Meeting you—that is the real story.” 

She pushed away his hand that had lifted to hers. 

“You’re all right now. I’m going back. Good night 
and good luck.” 

He made no attempt to detain her. 

That night Pidge lay for a long time without sleep. 
She was forlorn and troubled and restless, but under¬ 
neath it all there was a queer little throb of happiness, 
like the recent night of the two letters. It would not 
be stifled. Every time she could get still enough, she 
was conscious of it, like the song of a bird that kept 
on and on, but was only audible in the lulls of almost 
unbroken traffic. She awoke in the night with the 
thought of him speeding westward on his train. 

The next night when she came home there was an¬ 
other letter from Los Angeles, another check dropped 
9i 



THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


out, and a clipping, which she read first—the wedding 
announcement of “Adolph Musser, the noted meta¬ 
physician, and Mrs. Hastings, wealthy widow of the 
late Rab Gaunt Hastings, firearms manufacturer of 
New England, at the Byzantine,” etc. 

Pidge didn’t have her guard up. The choke and 
the shame were too swift for her self-control. For 
the first time in many days the tears broke, the extra 
scaldy sort. If she had only been permitted to keep 
that first check uncashed for a few days longer! . . . 

The next was a day of dullness and misery, a May 
day of rain. Crossing Broadway, as she hurried to 
luncheon, she passed Rufus Melton in the crowd. Her 
lips parted to call, but she checked in time. He hadn’t 
seen her. She found herself standing loosely in the 
traffic, her hand to her mouth, until a taxi driver roared 
at her, and she swung into the stream of people again 
and reached the curb. 




XIV 


ISOLATION 

P IDGE was leveled with personal shame. Try as 
she would, she was as lacking in the ability to 
detach herself from Melton, as from the influ- 
ence of her father. She had felt the boy’s power over 
her, and knew innately that she would feel it again; that 
this sort of thing wasn’t a mere touch and go; that meet¬ 
ings like this, which appear sporadic on the surface, 
have twined roots beneath. She had been taught from 
a child that nothing merely happens. The incentive that 
made her lend him the fifty dollars, which she had held 
uncashed for nearly a month, did not mean to her now 
a mere impulsive mistake. It was a symbol of a giving 
to this boy—of a blind but eager something out of the 
depths of her heart. 

Late in June a letter came to her from Dicky Cobden, 
who was at Coquihatville on the Equator, where as he 
said, “the sun’s rays fall as straight as a tile from a 
roof.” 

. . . Oh, yes, you and Miss Claes knew a lot more 
than I did that night at Tara Subramini’s. I shot off 
a lot of words afterwards. Never again. But I’m 
going to stay with it, Pidge. . . . I’ve just had ten 
93 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


days here in the jungles, back on one of the tributaries 
of the Kong. If I stayed long here, I would see it all 
as these exiled whi-te men do; that God is a rubber man 
with ivory legs; that the natives are vermin, not only 
to be walked over, but to be stamped into the ground. 
They whimper so. It’s too hot here to be whimpered 
at. ... I think so much about you. Of course, this 
isn’t news to you, but I say it, because it is so different 
from what I thought it would be. Something snapped 
when I got to the Kong. . . . All fat and decoration 
are sweated off down here. I reach out to you just the 
same. Only in New York I thought that we were both 
wrapt in the same sort of film, a tinted filmy sort of 
glamour that stretched out as we went different ways. 
That film was stretched too hard. When I reached the 
River it snapped. I think I’ll never get over feeling this 
awful isolation of being a separate creature from every¬ 
body, worst of all from you. . . . 

. . . Next morning in the office John Higgins called 
her in to his desk. “Dicky has sent in some stuff. We 
begin to publish in August.” 

He took off his spectacles and wiped them on the 
flap of his necktie. His eyes looked watery, as if the 
light had run out in tears. 

“I’ve always heard that the Cobdens were honest,” 
he went on, “three generations of honest men. They’ve 
built something, Miss Musser. Not a business, that’s 
well enough, but they’ve built a man. Listen-” 

He opened the pages at random and began to read. 
It was like the stuff in her letter. 

94 





ISOLATION 


“It’s so for pages and pages,” he continued. “Every 
word standing out, if you get the hang of it. No tint, 
no art; just words, pain-born, separate like boulders in 
a field. He has no hopes, yet he writes what he sees. 
. . . Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, 
besides Africa. . . . He watches the string of natives 
coming in with their tusks; he watches the crocodiles 
coming up to the blinding surface water; he watches 
the big monkeys that live in twos, and the little monkeys 
that live in troops. I don’t know what the world’ll get 
out of this, but I know what I get out of it-” 

She saw that John Higgins was merely thinking out 
loud. A few moments later he finished: 

“This stuff amounts to the most subtle and incred¬ 
ible rearraignment of imperialistic cruelty, but Dicky 
doesn’t mean it that way. He keeps repeating with 
devilish calm that it isn’t so bad as it was. It’s no 
particular nation, but all whites. He writes from the 
standpoint of a white man who remembers Cortez in 
Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, Warren Hastings in India, 
Cecil Rhodes in Africa and our own dear religious 
settlers bringing Yankee wits and rum and disease to 
the red Indians. He turns over the pages of all 
patriotic histories with a long stick as you would poke 
the leaves from the face of a corpse you had made 
yourself. His face tries to turn away; his stomach 
retches, but he knows each man and each nation must 
bury his own dead.” 

“ 'Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, 
besides Africa,’ ” Pidge repeated, when she was alone. 
95 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


Summer days in New York, sleepy stewy days. The 
low clouds made the nights hot. Pidge was used to 
the “high sky” of Southern California where every inch 
of shadow meant coolness, where cool night fell quickly 
no matter how hot it had been in the sun, where there 
were no afterglows, nor afterheats, and you wanted a 
wrap the instant the sun went down. The meaning of 
summer in New York became a cruel meaning, in the 
little room off the area. It gave her an astonishing 
grasp of what people suffered in the tenements. 

Two weeks after the copy arrived from Africa, the 
galleys came up on the Cobden articles, and Pidge asked 
permission to take a set home to show two friends of 
Dicky’s in Harrow Street. John Higgins acquiesced. 
Pidge delivered these to Miss Claes and forgot all 
about it, until the next night when she returned to the 
house after dinner, and Miss Claes called her from 
the door of Cobden’s “parlor.” 

“Come in, Pidge, and we’ll shut everything out.” 

Nagar was within and the galleys were stretched out 
under the light. Pidge had never seen Miss Claes and 
Nagar quite like this. They appeared happy over some¬ 
thing they had found in Dicky Cobden’s isolation and 
melancholy—happy as in the news of a legacy. 

“Why, don’t you see?” said Miss Claes strangely. 
“He’s pondering on Life! He thinks he’s reporting 
—when really he is giving himself to Life. The world 
stretches out before his eyes without glamour, stripped. 
He offers himself to it, but his writing contains a con¬ 
fession with the weariness of the ages on it, that he 
96 




ISOLATION 


has nothing to give—that he is a sham like all the rest. 
There’s not a self-pose in all his pages.” 

Nagar had slipped out. Miss Claes came close and 
added softly: 

“Richard is finer than we knew, Pidge. What hap¬ 
pened here in this house has prepared him—always the 
4 wrecker before the builder.” 

“You mean, I’m the wrecker?” 

“You couldn’t have done differently. . . . Too bad 
he isn’t to see Mohandas Gandhi. Nagar has received 
word that the Little Man is returning to India. Richard 
didn’t go to Natal first.” 

“He’ll be so sorry,” Pidge said. “It was Nagar’s 
story that drew him to Africa-” 

Their eyes met; no need to amplify. 

“Dicky’s so deadly in earnest,” Pidge went on. “He 
sees what he sees the same at ten in the morning and 
at ten at night. His coming to Harrow Street didn’t 
mean a whim. His part that night of our Punjabi 
dinner didn’t mean a whim. Oh, but I’m so glad he 
hasn’t started out to save the world!” 

“He’s preparing to work better than that.” 

“I feel so ungrateful for not missing him more,” 
Pidge added unsteadily, “for not being more interested 
in this that pleases you. I can appreciate, but oh, Miss 
Claes, I don’t belong to your way of seeing things. I’ll 
always be Dicky Cobden’s hangman, always hurting 
myself more!” 

They were standing close together. 

“Nothing matters to me but myself!” Pidge moaned. 

9 7 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“Fm hopelessly lost in myself—that’s what’s the mat¬ 
ter! What room have I for Africa or the world? 
There’s more to me in the struggle of John Higgins not 
to get drunk—in the body hunger and body love of 
Fanny Gallup—in the lies of Rufus Melton! I can 
understand this world-service thing—oh, I can see the 
nations like chessmen on the table!—but I can’t fix 
Fanny Gallup or John Higgins. I can’t fix Rufus Mel¬ 
ton. I can’t fix myself!” 




XV 


THE COBDEN INTERIOR 

P IDGE heard about the assassinations in Bosnia 
as wearily as of a murder in little Sicily. She 
heard rumors of war in Europe with ennui 
—how could there be energy enough left in the human 
race to make war? She met Nagar in the lower hall 
at Harrow Street on the evening that war became a 
fact. He looked like a dead man walking in the twi¬ 
light. She didn’t see Miss Claes at all that night. 
The next day in the office war began to show its per¬ 
sonal aspects to Pidge Musser of Los Angeles. John 
Higgins was hours late in returning from lunch. She 
saw that he wouldn’t be down at all to-morrow. He 
looked old. He had on a black frock coat, as if dressed 
for pallbearing, though his face looked as if he were 
about to be borne himself. The little office was fumy, 
sweetish. 

“Our blessed Savior moves in mysterious ways,” he 
remarked. 

Pidge lingered at the door to get any significance 
that this might have for her. 

“The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” he added, 
sitting back straight in his chair. 

He removed his spectacles and reached for the flare 

99 



THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


of his tie to polish them off, but no tie dangled to-day. 
It was a little black store-made bow, fastened with a 
clip over the collar button. Pidge still lingered, her 
hand on the knob. 

‘‘Blessed be the name of the Lord,” said John Hig¬ 
gins, “but it’s hell on us.” 

She started out, but was called back. 

“I need an audience, Miss Musser. I need a female 
ear. I need ladylike sympathy. It isn’t sweet of you 
to run off.” 

“What’s the matter?” 

The editor looked at her, squinted, put on his spec¬ 
tacles and looked again. 

“Do you mean to say you don’t know what’s the 
matter?” 

“Everything is the matter,” said Pidge. “But what’s 
new?” 

His hand nearest her lifted and rested upon a pile 
of page proof on his desk. 

“Dicky Cobden hasn’t written a line from the Kong 
that we can publish. We’ve cabled him to come in, 
though he’s probably started. You’ll recall that Bel¬ 
gium lies between France and Germany. She’s holding 
the Germans off from Paris, giving France and England 
a chance to get set. Belgium’s the world’s public square 
right now, the one vortexical spot on the face of the 
earth. Doesn’t it occur to you that even a new angle 
on her sins in the heart of Africa is about as much in 
time and place right now, as Paul Revere’s ride?” 
ioo 



THE COBDEN INTERIOR 


. . . Three weeks later, she heard that Richard 
Cobden was in town; that John Higgins had seen 
him the night before. All that day at the office she 
kept listening for his step and voice, but he didn’t come. 
His car was in front of the Harrow Street house, how¬ 
ever, when she reached there, and a light showed 
between the doors from his “parlor.” She lost some 
of the sense of suffocation when she saw that, a curious 
gladness for a moment. She tapped the door with her 
finger tip, pulled the curtain aside ever so little and said: 

“Hello.” 

A quick step in the inner room; then he was before 
her in the doorway, drawing her in under the light. 

“Pidge—Pidge,” he repeated. 

The boyish look was gone from him. He might 
have been taken for ten years older. The thing had 
happened that takes place abruptly in many Americans, 
more among business men than artists: Youth had 
been put away, its trace of divine humor exchanged 
for adult seriousness. 

“Why didn’t you come to the office to-day, Dicky?” 
she asked. 

“I wanted to see you here—like this.” 

They were standing under the light. 

“Why, you’re different,” she said. 

“John Higgins said that. They told me so at home, 
uptown. I feel different, but it isn’t an improvement. 
And you, Pidge, you’re taller. And John Higgins 
says you’re doing so well.” 

“Pm thanking you every day for that-” 

IOI 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


She kept thinking about the change in him. If this 
were selflessness, she liked him better before. He had 
been quite unselfish enough, she thought. She didn’t 
see the fight in him, because it was so subtly identified 
with herself. She only knew that he seemed without 
fight. 

“Keep on your things, Pidge. We’ll go out some¬ 
where-” 

That was the beginning of strange days and evenings. 
They played at the old game of Comrades. Often they 
lunched together, occasionally with John Higgins for 
a third. At such times it seemed that they took The 
Public Square with them, subscribers, advertisers, 
contributors, policies. It was that curious time in 
America when the personal and national meaning of 
the European war was breaking through with all its 
paralyzing ramifications; when all who were sensitive 
at all reflected division and strife in themselves, as a 
deep leveling sickness. 

Pidge was taken to the Cobden home, a new and 
terrifically complicated modern apartment in East 
Fiftieth Street, but the furnishings, the household 
ceremonials, the people themselves, suggested prints of 
New York interiors in 1870—respectable, established, 
grim. The gradual speeding up of the world for a half 
century to the explosive point of 1914 ended with the 
click of the key in this hall door, and you were in the 
world of another day, with a spinster aunt, a widowed 
mother, an unmarried sister, a slowly disintegrating 
102 





THE COBDEN INTERIOR 


grandfather, and Dicky himself, not in a different guise 
at all—the same courteous, sincere Dicky, but now to 
Pidge Musser’s western eyes, utterly, revealingly com¬ 
prehensible. This was the place that had made him. 
This was his reason for being. 

Here life was life. Here was the family unit, the 
family a globe, all human society moving outside like 
the water around a bubble; a closed globe reflecting all 
else in curious unreality. Here three-score-and-ten was 
life, and a very long time. Life wasn’t a spiritual ex¬ 
periment, in matter; not an extension in matter of 
souls that had made innumerable such experiments, but 
straight work-a-day three-score-and-ten with oblivion 
at the birth end, and heaven or hell at the other. Here 
was All Time, in which it behooved man and woman 
to gather worldly goods and religious goods and love 
one another and hang together—for the rest was with 
God. Here senility was dear. The heavy-bodied, dim- 
minded grandfather was still grandfather, not the van¬ 
ishing spirit of him. They would weep when the body 
passed. They would look to his place in the cemetery 
and say, “Here he lies.” 

Pidge Musser wanted to scream, not at the limita¬ 
tions, but at the kindness which was showered upon 
her. They were ready to perform the great transaction 
of taking her in, opening their hearts and house to a 
maiden, who would bring respectable additions to the 
Cobden line—sharing wealth, well-being, gentleness, the 
Cobden name which had been kept clean and useable 
and virile, and the Cobden God, who stood on the other 
103 




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side of death with angelic associates and rewards in 
His hands. 

Pidge continually felt that her next word would ruin 
everything; yet they unswervingly regarded her as be¬ 
coming one with themselves; the process of assimilation 
already begun. They were patient, knowing of old that 
a new maiden would have incrustations of the world 
to check off, inequalities to be planed down. They 
set about not adjusting to her, but as she fancied, 
assimilating her, as the changeless Chinese assimilate 
a weaker race, breaking down the foreigner in them¬ 
selves. She would become theirs to them with the 
years. 

“Oh, Dicky,” Pidge said, when they were in his car 
again. “I see. I understand. How did you dare to 
open those doors to me!” 

“I spoke of you at home, Pidge. They wouldn’t 
have understood if I hadn’t brought you soon. They 
were prepared to open their arms to you. They have 
their laws-” 

“But they are your laws, Dicky—how did you dare ? 
Is it because you don’t know me, don’t see me at all? 
Do you see something which you want to see, that has 
nothing to do with me?” 

“What is it that troubles you so?” 

“Myself—always and forever myself! Oh, don’t 
you see I have nothing to do with them? Why, you’re 
comfortable, Dicky — your people are comfortable! 
This is life to you—this, here and now! It isn’t to 
me. Life’s an exile to me, a banishment and coldness 
104 





THE COBDEN INTERIOR 


and pain. In all New York there are not two such 
opposites. My God is far away. Yours is here—a 
Person.’* 

He answered hopelessly: “I can see how it would 
strike you, but I couldn’t cover up on account of that. 
I belong to them. I’m of them. Any front I might 
put on wouldn’t wear. You had to see us, Pidge-” 

Another time she might have seen the fine thing 
back of those words, but she took such finenesses of 
Richard Cobden for granted, while he rarely could 
understand that she saw anything but his faults. 

“It’s queer,” he said, in the same dull hopeless way. 
“I stand to you as the most staid and changeless per¬ 
son, but to my family I am dangerous, a fulminant. 
They love and trust me, but watch me with fierce con¬ 
cern. Already I’ve broken more Cobden convictions 
in twenty-five years than all my relatives in all their 
years.” 

His face glanced wearily toward her from the lights 
of the street, as he drove. 

“You’ve let me understand too much for one Sun¬ 
day afternoon,” she said in an awed voice, “and it feels 
colder and lonelier than ever before. I even see some¬ 
thing of the coming years, Dicky. I see that it means 
Fate, when you say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I see that you turn 
to a girl to stay. I see you don’t cheat. I see that 
I’m volatile compared; that my honesty is a fierce effort, 
a deadly self-conscious effort, and yours is an estab¬ 
lished habit. I’m clumsy at my honesty. I love it 
i OS 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


terribly, but it is still on the outside of me—something 
to attain.” 

She sank back, laughing. “I wonder if it will stay 
as deadly clear as this?” 

“You are not making it quite clear to me,” he said. 

“I must. Oh, I must. Dicky, please open your soul 
and listen to me—hard, hard! While it’s clear, I must 
talk. You’ve chosen to be my friend. You’ve chosen 
not to take the easier course of hating me. I under¬ 
stand all that better now than the night of the Punjabi 
dinner.” 

“I do, too,” said Cobden, and bitterness of the Afri¬ 
can rivers was in his words. 

“Do I have to begin by saying how dear you are— 
how kind, how utterly good it is to know you; what 
it means to have faith and trust in one man ?” 

“Please not, Pidge.” 

“But never forget it, Dicky. It’s the pedestal upon 
which everything’s builded. Always remember that I 
know you underneath; that I turn to you in trouble 
—not like a brother or father or lover, but what our 
word comrade means—what it will sometime mean to 
many people! That’s you. But, Dicky, because I 
know you—I can look away! Don’t you see—you’re 
like something done! Having found you, I can turn 
to other things.” 

“I’ll try to see that, but most people find each other 
differently, to stay-” 

“It’s because they don’t find what I’ve found. I 
don’t know what I want, only I know there are terrible 
106 





THE COBDEN INTERIOR 


undone things in me, that other people stir to life. 
I’m lost in persons. Miss Claes and Nagar lose them¬ 
selves in nations. You’re getting to be like them, but 
I see it all in the personal! . . . Listen, Dicky, if you 
were to get a woman to take to your house—one ready 
to go in and be a Cobden and a mother of Cobdens— 
I could love her! I could hold to you just as close, 
though secretly. I would expect you to be my comrade 
just the same—I mean just between us—never on the 
outside, perhaps. What I mean is, it wouldn’t hurt 
me—not the thing we have together.” 

His car had come to a stand in the stillness of Har¬ 
row Street, but still they sat. 

“What you mean is—you haven’t any place for me 
as a lover or a husband.” 

“That’s like you, but that’s it. . . . Dicky, you mean 
to me something done, something found. I don’t dare 
to turn to you and rest. The savage undone things in 
me won't rest! They demand experiences, life—and 
no one knows better, that they mean pain . . . and oh 
—under your lamp—it’s horrible to tell it, but you’ll 
forgive me later, when you see that it had to be 
told-” 

“What are you talking about, Pidge?” 

“Under your lamp—in there! He came about a 
manuscript. He was broke and needed help—all his 
stories refused. He asked to see me that night. Miss 
Claes’ basement was occupied. She sent him up. We 
talked. He wanted something, money, everything. 
107 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


Under your light — he took me to him, his coat 
open-” 

Cobden startled her, as he cleared his throat. The 
silence between them had been so deep. 

“It meant nothing to him! He was used to it. It 
was only his way to get something—money most, he 
wanted. It was just as he might take a waitress or hall 
maid—used to having girls ‘fall for’ him. This is 
what I mean—though I understand him, a theatrical 
mind, a liar—life meant something to me that instant, 
that it never meant before. Something I must do, 
something calling — pain, but something I haven’t 
done!” 

“You mean—you mean—it isn’t over?’’ 

“Just that, Dicky, and oh, forgive me! I may not 
see him ever again, but something in me isn’t ‘over.’ I 
had to tell you—to be honest, to learn to be honest. 
You’ll be glad some day!’’ 






XVI 


DICKY FEELS A SLUMP 

I T was nearly a week afterward when Pidge heard 
sounds, not of meeting only, but of mauling, from 
over the partitions of Richard Cobden’s office at 
The Public Square. Her desk was now in John Hig¬ 
gins’ room. The racket was “young”—something of 
the sort you expect in a college fraternity house, rather 
than in the editorial rooms of a magazine of dignified 
social protest and short story ideals. John Higgins 
winced and glared. Now the stranger’s voice was 
upraised: 

“You’re not seedy, Dick—you’re decayed! If Africa 
treats a man like that, I’m off the Sahara for life.” 

Pidge heard this with something of the sense of 
personal arraignment. The ugly part was that it was 
true, and it hadn’t been the truth a week before. Dicky 
had been changed when he arrived, but the change since 
their ride home from his mother’s apartment in Fiftieth 
Street was more definitely disturbing. She found John 
Higgins’ eyes upon her and started guiltily. He leaned 
forward to whisper: 

“It’s a fact. Something’s eating our Dicky. He’s 
losing his bounce.” 

For once, Pidge did not altogether blame herself. 
109 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


There had been no two ways about telling him what had 
happened under the light. She had been challenged to 
speak on their first evening together after his return, 
challenged every hour of the week afterward; and yet 
it was not until after the words were out, spoken in 
her particularly ruthless and unequivocal way, that she 
actually saw the power of their hurt. 

In Africa Dicky had stripped himself of hope, in the 
most complete way he knew. Africa is said to have a 
way of helping a man in this. Doubtless he had win¬ 
nowed this hope down to a semi-impersonal concept, 
that straight, clean devotion would win its reward. But 
Africa alone was one thing, and New York with Pidge 
was another. He had been entirely innocent of the pos¬ 
sibilities of pain his heart was capable of. 

Still they went out together. They tried, furiously 
tried, but the star toward which they had held their 
eyes, the star named Camaraderie, was for the pres¬ 
ent out of their sky. She tried to give herself in 
interest to his particular studies of world politics. His 
views had nothing to do with intuition or prophecy. 
Dicky gripped affairs on an academic basis of eco¬ 
nomics, and the only light he had to work with in 
relation to the turmoil in Europe was from the same 
friction that had furnished his sparks in Africa—the 
pain of his own heart. He told her of the delicate 
and dangerous adjustments between the nations, as 
he saw them; the organic play, the push and pull on 
every national boundary; the draw of Russia upon 
India, for instance; the grim hold of the British bull- 
no 




DICKY FEELS A SLUMP 


dog; the interatomic play of India, Ireland and Egypt; 
the poison vats of the Balkans, the frowning menaces 
of the Levant. One night he spoke of Italy’s inner 
and outer stresses, and of her age-old hatred for 
Austria. 

“And Pidge,” he said quietly, “you won’t mind my 
saying it, will you? I see it all so clearly when I talk 
to you. I know you’ll tell me that you don’t know 
anything about these things. You always tell me that, 
but you certainly make me know them better.” 

And another time when they were going out to¬ 
gether in the evening and she had come down from the 
upper floor with her wrap which he took for a moment: 

“I’m sure you won’t mind, Pidge,” he said, “if I 
tell you that the little things you wear quite take me 
over. They actually hurt, and I never saw you look 
quite like to-night.” 

This was the quality—more like the words of an 
older man; a touch of sentimentality upon them, as if 
he were diminished in her presence, something in him so 
whipped it did not dare appear on the surface. This was 
unpleasant to Pidge. The changeless want in his heart 
suffocated her at times; then her affection changed to 
revolt. She became irritable and uncentered, her tem¬ 
per hard to govern. She wanted freedom—freedom for 
something utterly undelineated, but freedom to Life 
(in Miss Claes’ meaning of that word of words) and 
she saw him in such times as one who stood in her way. 

One night in the little upper room, in her own par¬ 
ticular time of self-revelation, as Pidge lay on the 


hi 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


borderland between sleep and waking, she saw herself 
like an ogre, and Dicky Cobden like a terrified child 
in a great house, and she was driving him from one 
room to another, from one floor to another, to an in¬ 
evitable cornering in the farthest wing. 

Finally an early October evening, and again his car 
had halted before 54 Harrow Street. Pidge sat beside 
him, but Dicky had not opened the door. 

“Pidge,” he said suddenly, “I’ve got to the end of 
my rope. I’m not making good. I’m all blurred on 
what we’re trying to do. It’s—it’s too much for me 
here. ... I don’t want France or Flanders. I’m going 
into the Near East for The Public Square and a news¬ 
paper syndicate.” 

“I knew it. I felt it coming, at least,” she said. 
“And I’ve failed, too, all the time. But, Dicky, back 
of everything, I know there must be somebody laughing 
at our seriousness and stupidity. We’ll see the puzzle 
straight some time. You’ll see.” 

They both were sitting straight up. 

“Nobody’s—nobody’s shoulder?” he asked with ter¬ 
rible effort. 

“No, Dicky. It would only fog us up—all the more.” 




XVII 


NEW LODGERS FOR HARROW STREET 

P IDGE MUSSER was ending her second year 
in the editorial rooms of The Public Square, 
when a short story came in from Rufus Melton. 
Meanwhile, his work had begun to appear in magazines 
of large popular appeal. This manuscript, called The 
Boarded Door, had doubtless not fitted into any of 
them. The chief thing about the story to Pidge was 
that her cheeks burned as she read. 

This made her angry. Another thing, the story 
was so familiar to her. She seemed to be in and out 
of Melton’s mind, hearing his typewriter, understand¬ 
ing even his corrections. But also she saw what the 
author could not—his fluctuations of fancy, which 
uncentered the tale. 

“He’s beginning to be read,” said John Higgins. 
“It’s not a bad story. We’d better take it.” 

“It is not his best work. There’s a cavity in it,” 
said Pidge. “If it were by a new name altogether, 
we’d write the author suggesting that he work over the 
weak part.” 

“Do it,” said John Higgins. 

Pidge laughed nervously. “He won’t like it,” she 
said. 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“Don’t mind that. Rufus Melton can write. He’ll 
have his hour, but go ahead and scuttle the ship, young 
woman. We don’t care about pleasing our passengers.” 

Back at her own desk, Pidge was smitten with the 
idea that she wasn’t being fair. In the course of read¬ 
ing Melton’s story, she had not once forgotten that he 
had failed to pay back that fifty dollars. Not only that, 
Rufus Melton hadn’t mentioned it; and he was said 
to be making money right now. She had to write the 
letter to Melton three times. Films of ice formed on 
the sentences and had to be skimmed off, in spite of her 
most rigid effort. She carried the sheet, signed by 
“The Editors,” to John Higgins, with a restless feeling 
that damage was done. 

“That’s just like what Dicky Cobden would say,” 
he remarked, handing it back. “Send it along with the 
manuscript.” 

Pidge wasn’t allowed to forget Dicky Cobden, though 
Richard, himself, was across the world and remained 
across, apparently groping to find the exact antipodes 
from Washington Square, New York. Between Miss 
Claes’ affection for him and John Higgins’ and 
Nagar’s; considering her occasional use of his “parlor” 
in Harrow Street and her daily use of his old desk 
in the office, to say nothing of the position she occupied 
through his kindness and care—no, she wasn’t being 
allowed to forget. 

About the same time that Rufus Melton’s story came 
in to the office, a dingy bit of white paper came to 
Harrow Street for Pidge. It was like a paper you 
114 




LODGERS FOR HARROW STREET 


would see in the street around a public school building. 
Pidge was awed at the unfailing magic of the post- 
office authorities, that the letter had ever been delivered. 
It was from Fanny Gallup, who had married Albert 
and left the pasting table shortly after Pidge’s change 
of fortune. Pidge had seen Fanny but once in the 
meantime, but had asked her to write or telephone in 
case of need. 

Pidge found the hall designated in the third floor 
of a condemned building in Foley Street, and was 
directed to a door through which came the sounds of 
a crying child. Her knock was answered, and the caller 
gradually realized through the shadows that she was 
being grinned at. She smiled back, wondering if the 
shoeless creature were Fanny’s sister or mother. She 
wore no outer waist and a heavy plaid skirt that was 
splashed with wash water. An infant shrank into 
the hollow curve of her body, and another child sat 
wailing on the wet floor behind. 

“I thought you’d come, Musser.” 

It was Fanny herself. Pidge had crossed the thresh¬ 
old to look into eyes in which hate and hunger moved 
in a narrow orbit; narrow like the wet spot on the 
floor, in which the first-born played. Tired back, 
draggled hair, merely a stretched and faded vestige 
of a girl was Fanny Gallup now. Laugh and street 
talk were gone for the time, at least; gone as Albert, 
the barber, as much a myth as ever, so far as Pidge 
was concerned, though the place hypothecated a male 
parent. These three remaining seemed purposeless bits 

H5 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


of life which a perverted scheme permitted to live on. 

Pidge hated herself for becoming involved in the 
complication. For the moment, she hated New York 
that could not keep itself clean. No rent, no food, some¬ 
body else’s washing in the tubs, and the rags of Fanny 
and her children unwashed. 

“ ... No, it ain’t no good to think of staying, 
Musser, because they’re tearing the buildin’ down.” 

“How much rent do you owe?” 

“Five weeks. But it ain’t no good to pay that, 
because I got to get out anyway. Gawd, Redhead, 
you look like a doll in a window!” 

“Is there any place around here where you can go ?” 

“It’s hard to get in with the two, and you’d have 
to pay a month in advance,” Fanny said. 

“How soon do you have to leave here?” 

“Four days. That’s why I sent the letter.” 

“Have you got any—anything to eat?” 

“That’s why I sent the letter. That’s why they keep 
squalling all the time.” 

“I’ll be back before dark,” Pidge said, turning into 
the hall. 

“You’ll—sure—come—back ?” 

“Sure,” called Pidge. 

She returned with her arms full of groceries, and 
went home promising to come back the next afternoon. 

“ . . . Bring them here. There is no other way,” 
Miss Claes said. 




LODGERS FOR HARROW STREET 


“But they’re not clean!” Pidge moaned. “They are 
too sick to keep clean.” 

“We can freshen them up a little,” said Miss Claes. 

“But there’s nothing Fanny can do, unless the two 
children are taken from her. I mean she’s held to the 
room with them now, and they’ve been crying so long 
that they can’t stop. They both cry at once, and she 
doesn’t hear them; they look and listen for a second 
and then go on crying. If one stops, he hears the 
other. The place smelled like a sty, and the packages 
of food I brought got wet and spoiled before they 
were opened.” 

“Forget about them until to-morrow, Pidge, and 
then get a taxicab and bring them here. I’ve got a 
second-floor room toward the back.” 




XVIII 


AN OUTER CHANGE 

M ISS CLAES standing by the table in her 
own room heard a step upon an upper stair¬ 
way ; not on the immediate basement stairs, 
but of one descending from the second to the first 
landing. The tread was deliberate. She heard it now 
in the hall directly above. Miss Claes moved to the 
door, her hand against her cheek; then back to stand 
by the table again. Now the step was on the basement 
stairs. A fire was burning in her grate, and that was 
the main light of the room, for the winter morning was 
very gray. The table was prepared for one—plate and 
cup of ruddy gold, a cutting of white hyacinth in a 
purple vase. The footsteps approached in the basement 
hall; a heavy bag was placed down outside Miss Claes' 
door; then Nagar appeared, a dark hat and an overcoat 
upon his arm. He came forward, and the two stood 
together for a moment. 

“At least this once, I can serve you/' Miss Claes 
said. 

Nagar smiled as he sat down to the table. Miss Claes 
went into the kitchen and presently brought a pot 
of tea in a Chinese basket and a covered dish. She 
filled a goblet from the water bottle, and stood behind 
118 


AN OUTER CHANGE 


his chair while Nagar ate. The house was strangely 
silent. 

Nagar arose. They stood together again for a 
moment by the mantel. He spoke in Hindi, and she 
listened, like one already weary, hearing of more things 
to do. Not until she smiled, did he turn away. She 
did not follow to the door, nor look toward the window, 
as he passed up the steps to the street. After a long 
time, she stepped to the cabinet for a cigarette and lit 
it standing by the fireplace. 




XIX 


FANNY DRIES HER TEARS 

F ANNY GALLUP was taking life easy. She 
had not been separated from her children, but 
relieved for the present from the hunger drive 
to support them. Pidge helped to pay Fanny’s room 
and board, but didn’t miss the fact that the main ex¬ 
pense fell upon Miss Claes. 

‘‘There is a little fund back of me for just such 
cases, Pidge,” Miss Claes said. “I rarely divulge the 
fact, but there is no reason in the world why you should 
be inconvenienced.” 

“Except that I brought her here-” 

“I asked you to.” 

“Except that she called on me in her trouble, and 
I worked elbow to elbow with her for four months, 
and she pulls out the very devil from me every time 
I see her.” 

“Your feeling of responsibility is what makes you 
what you are—I never miss that, Pidge. If you weren’t 
so hard and straight on all the tricky little matters of 
dollars and cents, you can be very sure I’d never tell 
you my secret of secrets, about the fund.” 

“I’ll have to pay what I can, if only because I hate 
120 


FANNY DRIES HER TEARS 


to so. But I can never pay for bringing her to your 
house.” 

Miss Claes laughed. ‘‘That is only the way you see 
it. Fanny isn’t heavy on us here. Not at all. It’s the 
dear, possessive Pidge that is hurt. Do you suppose 
I am torn by what goes on in the rooms and halls ? Not 
torn beyond repair from day to day, at least. Fanny’s 
only a little more simple than most, a little less secre¬ 
tive.” 

“She’s unmoral,” Pidge declared solemnly. “The 
awful thing is, she doesn’t learn. Life passes through 
her like a sieve, leaves its muck on her, and she doesn’t 
learn.” 

Philosophy seldom helped Pidge; she had heard too 
much of it, and money was invariably a serious affair. 
In the California life there had never been enough 
money for all needs. Adolph Musser was unable to do 
without what he wanted, even though the immediate 
tradespeople of the neighborhood were frequently 
forced to. The metaphysician relied upon the Law of 
Providence to take care of them; and this had hacked 
and hewed into Pidge’s disposition; this had meant 
red war to her soul up to the last hour in her father’s 
house. 

Here in New York the fight had been different. 
Even with Miss Claes mysteriously back of her from 
the beginning, she had faced, in her first few months 
in New York, the ugly candor of starvation. There was 
established in Pidge both from Los Angeles and New 
York experiences, a determination to fix herself un- 
121 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


rockingly on her own feet in a financial way; and now, 
just as she might have gotten a bit ahead, was the 
expense of Albert’s children, and the claims of their 
mother, which were getting to look as interminable 
to Pidge as a ninety-nine years’ lease. 

Another trouble was that Fanny was beginning to 
show fresh traces of her sense of the “fun of the thing.” 
Her spine was stiffening a little with good food and rest, 
and curious little suggestions of starch showed in lips 
and hair and breast that had been utterly draggled. 
She was often seen hanging over the banisters; sure 
indication of renewal of life and hope. She didn’t weep 
over the departed Albert; in fact, Pidge Musser ob¬ 
served, as an added revelation of the hatefulness of 
life, that Fanny was back on the scene looking for a man 
—not earnestly, not passionately, but without compunc¬ 
tion and entirely unwhipped. Fanny granted that she 
was nobody, that she never had been; but that was no 
sign why she should pass up anything that was going 
by. Pain and hunger were forgotten like a sickness. 

One night as she was coming in, Pidge heard Fanny’s 
low laugh on the floor above, as she ran upstairs in 
time to shoo a lodger from Fanny’s arms in the door¬ 
way. Then she followed into the littered room and 
a light was made. The two women faced. The laugh 
remained unwithered on Fanny’s cheerful face. 

“Oh, Musser, you look so cross,” she panted. 

“Don’t you remember—?” Pidge began. 

“Remember wot?” 

“What you were in that beast’s nest in Foley Street?” 

122 



FANNY DRIES HER TEARS 


“That’s what you always want, Musser, always want 
me to keep rememberin’, just as I’m getting straight¬ 
ened out.” 

The fashion of Fanny’s straightening out settled 
upon Pidge, as she looked around the room. Its awful¬ 
ness was beyond tears to her, even beyond laughter. 

“Fanny Gallup, if you bring another baby here, 
I’ll—I’ll-” 

“There ain’t going to be no other baby here, Musser. 
I ain’t nobody’s chicken like that.” 





XX 


THEY WALK IN CIRCLES 

O NE day just as Pidge was finishing luncheon 
with John Higgins, she was startled to hear 
Melton’s voice. He moved around their table 
with a fling of his coat tails and held out both his hands. 
It actually sounded, though she never was sure, as if he 
said something like, “I’ve been looking everywhere for 
you.” 

Pidge fancied a' sort of rueful wonder on the old 
editor’s face, as he announced his haste to get back 
to the office, and bolted out. . . . She was recalling 
the baby carriage in Santa Monica. Melton’s face was 
slightly broader, she thought, and the poise of young 
success was upon it. One thing she had never known 
before was how remarkably well his curly head was 
placed upon its shoulders. The neck was not merely 
a nexus, but a thing of worth in itself, with arch and 
movement which made him look taller and intimated 
something light and fleet, touching memories which 
Pidge could not quite grip. 

They were together in the street. Melton had asked 
her to walk with him to his bank. He seemed on both 
sides of her at once, his hand drawing her deftly this 
way and that through the crowd, his chat and laughter 
124 


THEY WALK IK CIRCLES 


in her ears, and an old indescribable weariness and help¬ 
lessness in herself. 

“ . . . Sure, I could have hunted you up. In fact, 
I would have done it eventually, but I haven’t been in 
New York all the time; running back west to get my 
stuff up, now and then.” 

“I thought you lived in New York,” Pidge said. 

“I keep an apartment in East Twenty-fourth Street,” 
he granted. 

A lull for just an instant before he went on: 

“You see, it’s handy to my publishers, and my bank 
is only a square or two away.” 

Pidge wished she could accept him for just what 
he seemed—the upstart American in literature. She 
wished to forget everything else, save the youth who 
said, in effect, “This is my bank, this is my solicitor, 
this is my publisher.” But she could not smile her 
scorn and pass on. She felt like the parent of a child 
showing off. Back of the tinkle and flush of these big 
days of his, which he seemed to be drinking in so 
breathlessly, she felt more than ever that thing about 
him which was imprisoned. A thing it was that called 
to her, kept calling beseechingly. 

“I’ll never forget,” he said, speaking of the fifty 
dollars—“I’ll never forget that night, when I left you 
—and the fog in the Square. Everything was dif¬ 
ferent, after that.” 

“You didn’t go to Cleveland that night, as you said,” 
she declared, watching the curve of his black lashes. 

The eyes darted her way. 

125 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“Lucky, I didn’t,” he said. “God! How I wanted 
to! New York had me bluffed that night, before you 
came to the rescue.” 

“Why didn’t you go?” 

“I was up close to Grand Central with my bag, when 
the idea struck me—the idea that has since come out in 
the story series that has caught on. I could hardly 
realize that I had your money. I kept it in my hand 
*—the hand in my pocket. That was a turning point in 
a life. New York had frightened me pretty nearly 
to death—the hunger thing, you know. All I wanted 
on earth was to crawl into that train for Cleveland, 
but it was as if you were calling on me to stay.” 

She turned in pain and amazement. He was looking 
straight ahead and talking softly. She saw every twist 
and drive of his mind as he dramatized the situation 
unfolding to him. He was deeply absorbed in the pic¬ 
tures which his fertile brain uncovered one by one. 
It hurt her like the uncovering of something perverted 
in herself. 

“Don’t go on like that,” she said. “You’re not 
working now. You are just walking in the street. 
You mustn’t make stories when you talk.” 

He glanced at her sorrowfully, as one realizing in 
himself a truth so big that he is willing to wait for it 
to be believed. 

“It is God’s truth,” he said. “That was the turning 
point in my career—that night—the night I turned back 
from the train. It was as if you were calling me, and 
it was as if the idea came from you. I knew I had 
126 




THEY WALK IN CIRCLES 


to stay on and do the work here, close to the markets.” 

She looked into his face and laughed. 

“And you could forget me—forget the fifty dollars 
for nearly a year!” 

“I don’t blame you for talking that way. I expect 
to be misunderstood—not me, but the thing I stand 
for.” 

She was hushed. Could he mean that he suffered 
in conscious conflict? Could it be that he was aware 
at all of that imprisoned thing she saw back of his eyes ? 
He had halted, and now she turned again for him to 
go on. 

“I hoped that you, you of all, might understand,” 
he said. “Why, it was from you that the whole thing 
started.” 

He seemed actually to be making himself believe 
it. She felt herself trying to give him the benefit 
of the doubt. 

“Do you know you’re changed?” he said, in sudden 
exultation. “Do you know you’re five times as charm¬ 
ing? What’s happened?” 

“Nothing has happened,” said Pidge. 

“It was the strangest shock, in the restaurant when 
I saw you. I knew it was you, and yet you’ve put on 
something—out of the ordinary.” 

“Oh, don’t. ... I must go back to the office now.” 

“The bank is just half a block. We’ve been walking 
in circles. I hadn’t a check in my pocket. ... I wanted 
to walk with you anyway. Do you really have to get 
back to the office?” 


127 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“Oh, yes.” 

“Couldn’t you—couldn’t we go down on the river 
or to a show somewhere? I know what you’re think¬ 
ing: that if this meant so much to me, how could I 
let it go for nearly a year. But you’ll understand. 
You’ll see what I mean and what I’m up against. The 
thing was too big for me to rush in. I had to wait. 
But now that you’ve come, I can’t let you go.” 

“I must go back.” 

“To-night then. Couldn’t I meet you at The Public 
Square at five and have supper?” 

“Oh no. I must go home—first.” 

“May I call for you at Harrow Street, say at seven, 
or before that? Say, couldn’t we go to that old res¬ 
taurant where we went that night?” 

This idea had come to Pidge before he spoke; ex¬ 
actly, perhaps, as it caught his fancy. 

“Yes, I could-” Pidge cleared her voice, and 

spoke again above the roar of the street. “Yes, I 
could.” 

Then because she had lifted her voice, she seemed 
to hear her own tones unforgetably, as if her soul 
echoed back the words. 

“But I must hurry back now,” she added. 

“Let’s get this bank thing finished.” 

But when they reached the door of the bank they 
found it closed for the rest of the day. 





XXI 


THE DINNER COAT 

J OHN HIGGINS came up through the newspapers 
and magazine editorial rooms in those brave days 
when a typewriter did not always go with a man’s 
desk, but a cuspidor nearly always. Even yet, the edi¬ 
tor of The Public Square tucked a piece of fine-cut be¬ 
tween his cheek and lower jaw after breakfast in the 
morning, and forgot about it just so long as it was 
there. The fact that he smoked from time to time 
caused no inconvenience to the wad of shredded leaf. 
He complained of indigestion and gave himself whole¬ 
heartedly to various forms of diet. 

He kept Pidge Musser close at hand during these 
trying war days. His former stenographer languished. 
John Higgins found a singular peace in working with 
Pidge and was innocent enough to discuss it. He was 
an old integer so far as women were concerned, never 
getting beyond the rare confession (when a few drinks 
ripened his mind) that he had had a mother once. He 
didn’t hate women; nothing like that. He had just 
merely walked around them as you walk around the 
shore of an ocean. He wasn’t born with a bathing suit 
and the idea of taking off his shoes and stockings made 
129 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


him hoarse with fright. Pidge, however, had crept in 
through the business door, and John Higgins awoke to 
find her at his side. 

Pidge found him like a somber relative of the elder 
generation, when she returned from her hectic walk 
with Melton that afternoon, but for once she could for¬ 
get John Higgins easily. Twenty times in her mind, 
at least, Pidge went over the talk and walk with Melton, 
her face often turned away to the window with a sad 
but scornful smile. She thought it out with hard sophis¬ 
tication, all that he had said of receiving inspiration 
from her, but underneath she wanted it to be so; and 
deep among the secrets of herself, she felt that what he 
said was possibly truer than he knew. 

Had he known that the bank would be closed ? She 
would soon learn about that, for he had promised to 
bring the check to-night. Even if he didn’t, she could 
never forget that calling to her, back of his actor eyes— 
calling like a child of her own. New York whirled by 
below; the manuscripts were piled high in front and 
side. A Mecca letter came in from Richard Cobden, 
intimating that he might go to India. Even that did 
not arouse John Higgins, nor startle Pidge Musser 
from the painful web she was in. 

Melton was at the basement entrance at seven. As 
Pidge went down to meet him, Fanny Gallup was 
coming up. They met in the second hall. Fanny stood 
in the gaslight, her arms open wide, her dress open at 
the breast, her eyes laughing. 

“I saw him, Redhead. He’s a God-awful, that boy. 
130 




THE DINNER COAT 


Don’t you bring no little baby to this house! I won’t 
stand for it.” 

Melton wore a black cape coat, a dinner coat beneath. 
Pidge felt as if she had left all her light in the second 
hall. She was exasperated with herself for pushing 
past Fanny and not taking the joke gracefully, exasper¬ 
ated with Melton for togging up to come to Harrow 
Street, to take her to that old eating house. Couldn’t 
he resist showing off for just one hour? 

Some awe seemed to have fallen upon him, or rather 
between them. In silence they rounded the almost empty 
curve of Harrow Street, and presently entered the 
crowds and lights and crashes of trestled Sixth Avenue. 
On the corner, as they crossed Eighth Street, Pidge 
heard a newsboy behind say, “There goes a movie 
actor.” Pidge deeply knew what that grimed child-face 
had seen. ... It troubled Melton to find the restaurant, 
and she didn’t help, though she had located it a score 
of times since that other night. At the table, while they 
waited, he took a fifty-dollar check from his pocket and 
handed it over, saying that the real part of the favor he 
would try to pay bit by bit through the years. 

“Because I’ll never get very far from you again,” 
he added queerly. “Find it very funny, don’t you? Sit 
there chuckling, don’t you? You can laugh, but it’s 
true.” 

Now Melton began to ask for things which weren’t 
on the bill-of-fare. He told the waitress how things 
should be prepared and served—this in a side-street eat- 
I3i 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


ing house, that specialized in beans and encouraged 
counter trade. There were hard lines around the mouth 
of the waitress which Melton commented upon, as she 
turned her back. Pidge had a warning to hold her 
temper, and yet she would have died first. 

“I’ve never worked in a restaurant,” she said, “but 
I’ve worked in a factory, and I know what those lines 
come from. They come from dealing with people like 
you, people who forget where they are, forget what they 
come for.” 

“How do I forget where I am ?” he asked. 

“Because you don't know that this is a place where 
they serve ‘eats.' ‘Eats’ are cooked all one way. ‘Eats’ 
are served fast in business hours, and the waiters sit 
around and gasp the other times, trying to catch up with 
themselves. And you don’t know where you are, be¬ 
cause you try to show these people and me that you’ve 
seen how it was done in uptown hotels.” 

A trace of sullenness showed in his eyes, and then 
a warmth of almost incredible delight. 

“It’s great! I never was scolded in my life!” 

“It wasn’t for supper alone—that wasn’t why I fell 
into the idea of coming here,” she said. “You forget 
it entirely. You dare to come in a dress suit—here— 
here!” 

“Listen,” he begged, “don’t run away with that idea. 
I thought we might go to a theater afterward. I didn’t 
think so much about where we were going as I did that 
I was coming to you. I didn’t have anything better 
than this to put on, and so I came this way.” 

132 




THE DINNER COAT 


A moment before it had seemed the most righteous 
and perfect thing under heaven to vent a few scathing 
remarks, but now she felt twisted and diminished. Long 
and religiously she had tried to keep her rages to herself. 
Neither spoke while the plates were being served, and 
then he said: 

“I was horribly out of true, in telling these people 
how to do it, but I wanted it good for you,” he added 
simply. 

She looked at him hard, but the intensity of her try¬ 
ing that instant kept her from reading what was really 
back of his eyes. 

“It’s plenty good enough for me,” she said. “I came 
here once when I had only twenty cents to live on that 
day—I remember the stool, that fifth stool, I sat on. 
I spent my twenty cents all at once,” she added, “and 
the grub was so good that I could have wept in the arms 
of the woman on the other side of the counter.” 

“Was that when you were working in the factory?” 
he asked. 

“No,” said Pidge, “it was before I got the job. I ate 
regularly after that.” 

“Where was the factory?” 

“Oh, way up in the other end of town. I labeled tins, 
salmon tins, baking powder tins, cocoa tins.” 

“To get local color ?” he asked. 

“To get food. I sat at a big table with a lot of girls, 
and in the hours and hours, in the monotony of the 
days, I found out how easy it is to get hard lines around 
133 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


the mouth. I learned to understand just enough to learn 
that I know nothing, and that’s a lot.” 

She was thinking of what a tension she had been in 
to escape from Fanny Gallup. 

“I worked on a ranch in Wyoming,” Melton ob¬ 
served, “cattle ranch.” 

“What were you doing on the Tunisian sands?” 

“Just ramming around the world. I got in bad with 
an Arab sheik. It was while running away from him 
that I got lost in the desert.” 

She saw his eyes kindle in the prospect of narration, 
his faculties forming a fresh tale, which she could not 
bear to hear that moment. She forestalled his fruit¬ 
fulness. 

They were in the streets. 

“No, I don’t want to go uptown,” said Pidge. “I 
don’t feel like the theater to-night-” 

“Wouldn’t you like a ride on the harbor? The fer¬ 
ries are empty this time of night.” 

“No, we’ll cross over to Harrow Street.” 

“May I come in? There’s so much to say. It’s just 
—finding you again—Pan.” 

“Not to-night. I want to be alone.” 

He didn’t answer. She felt a little better after that. 
She had thought it might be harder to have her way. 
There seemed always something he could not say behind 
his words. It wasn’t all lies. It became clear for a 
moment that he would follow after her—so long as she 
could run ahead; that he would only turn away and 
forget when she paused to breathe or play. 

134 





THE DINNER COAT 


“I feel strange,” he said in the silence of Harrow 
Street. “It is strange to-night. It’s like finding the 
house one has been lock'* * ~ x ot* so long—the house, even 
the door, but not the key. Pan,” he said suddenly, 
“give it to me. Give me the key. It’s you—it’s 
yours-” 

His strength was without strain, the strength that is 
effortless, the strength of laughter. He had taken her 
to him suddenly, and she dwelt in it, though resisting; 
something ecstatic, even in holding out. . . . She heard 
voices in herself and faces flashed through her mind— 
Cobden’s, Fanny Gallup’s—but her arms and shoulders 
and breast knew a terrible sweetness from his strength. 
It wasn’t hateful. It was like her own boy, not a 
stranger. His laughing face was nearer. It was com¬ 
ing to hers. In the dark she could see it, eyes and eye¬ 
lids, curving nostrils and laughing lips. She knew 
something would die in her when it touched . . . that 
she was dying now of the slowness of its coming. She 
ceased to struggle, and all that she had known and been 
arose within her to meet his lips. 

She was on the second flight of stairs. She almost 
prayed that Fanny’s door would not open. She wanted 
to be in her own little room, the smaller the better to¬ 
night—no touch or voice upon her. The key turned in 
her trembling hand. She was safe, the door locked 
again. She stood in the dark. Her lips moved audibly: 

“Am I—is it because I am my father’s child ?” 





XXII 


A LETTER FROM PIDGE 

R ICHARD COBDEN moved up and down the 
Near East for a long time, looking for the 
men they had told him about in school and 
college—the men who make history, and are said to con¬ 
tain in themselves the greatness of their race. He sailed 
with sailors, talked with the diploma-ed talkers, rode 
with soldiers. He found men who would do for their 
countries what they wouldn’t do for themselves, but the 
energy of their fidelity to their countries was balanced 
by their enmity toward other countries. They gave 
themselves to the heresy of fighting one part of the 
human family for the alleged enhancement of another. 
It took Dicky a long time to change the brain tracks 
made in school and college, that the names of history 
might not be the names of men who walked with God, 
whose intellects pained from sheer power. Nor was he 
spared from the suspicion in all his discoveries, that he 
was the one who was wrong, that he had become softly 
insane in the midst of new ideas. 

When he essayed the thing Miss Claes spoke of at 
the Punjabi dinner—he started something which he 
meant to live up to. The fact that it was harder than he 
136 


A LETTER FROM PIDGE 


dreamed; an effort, in fact, involving dreary years, 
hadn’t broken his resolution so far. One of the terms 
of the Punjabi dinner covenant, for such it had become 
to him, was not to lose himself in the easy way of 
hatred, nor to help himself to forgetfulness by casting 
Pidge Musser’s image out. He knew that the “one” 
she had spoken of was Rufus Melton. Through months, 
covering two years, the figure of this young story-writer 
rose higher and higher in his consciousness, as the per¬ 
son of the Enemy, himself. It was Melton, all unknow¬ 
ing, who vanquished Dicky in his weaknesses, and at 
best was only kept at bay in his strength. Not to cast 
her out, not to hate; to know the slow, steady burning 
of the heart that is focalized upon a woman, and to 
realize that this woman may be turning to another! 

There were really extraordinary days of service in 
Arabia with young Tom Lawrence, whose fame Dicky 
Cobden helped to make; desert days of camel back and 
Turk fighting; desert nights of smoke and tea in such 
starry stillnesses, that one almost expected the Christ 
to appear; then, after many weeks, mail at Mecca, and 
one letter from John Higgins, which was read several 
times: 


. . .You have done several good things for The 
Public Square; but you never did a better thing than 
wishing Miss Pidge Musser on our editorial rooms. 
She’s brand new every morning. She’s honest, and a 
worker. She has brains and a whole lot of psychic 
viscera, sometimes designated as Soul. . . . Also she’s 
137 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


a stenographer. Never whispered it until one morning 
when Maneatin’ Dollie was ill with the flu. My letters 
were piled up. “Give them to me,” she said. I did that 
thing, and I’ve been dictating my editorials ever since. 
It’s like talking to an intelligent audience. When I get 
opinionated and lose my balance, not seeing the other 
side of a question, this child sits up and looks disturbed. 
... I’m sending you separately our Brooklyn Bridge 
contemporary with a story called The Salt Pit. If it 
isn’t a little man of a story—I don’t know one. Hers. 
... Of course, you know why she didn’t give it to us. 
She thought I’d take it on her account and not for the 
story. . . . And still we stay out of the War. They’re 
sending over one big imperialist after another from 
London, trying to get us in, and all that’s flunkey in 
Washington, rocks—but so far, we’re only sinning com¬ 
mercially. . . . Give us more of the inky desert nights, 
Dicky, and young Lawrence. 

Dicky reached Bombay from Aden in the spring of 
1917. He was now on his way home, the long way 
around. He had told no one, but it had grown upon 
him of late that he could relish a bit of New York after 
more than two years. He coldly ignored in himself the 
tendency to thrill at the thought of seeing Pidge Musser 
again. He had made a bit of a name for himself as a 
reporter, but was known more as a first-class fact- 
getter than a feature writer among newspaper men. 
Facts were sometimes so bleak in his work that one had 
to possess real understanding and real love for honest 
materials to find the inherent beauty and order. His 

138 




A LETTER FROM PIDGE 


knowledge of international politics was now granted by 
all classes of newspaper men, but he was known espe¬ 
cially from his articles in The Public Square as one who 
exerted a steady pressure against America entering the 
war. 

To be cool was said to be Cobden’s religion. The 
stuff that he wrote was cool and the words that he said. 
“I am a reporter, only/’ he occasionally explained. “I 
write what I see, not my own reactions nor opinions.” 
He had come far in this doctrine, far enough to be 
trusted by white men of place in Turkey and the Holy 
Land, in spite of his curious scorn for war. He was 
somewhat slower now to get enthused over human ac¬ 
tions than he was when he left New York; his boyish 
humor had become grim. He had seen the worst things 
men do, and written a few of them. Though he had 
been through as much hard riding in two years as any 
empire-building Englishman, he seemed to retain no 
personal relation to his adventures. 

Other men talked about him, however. There was 
something about the American that made it easy for 
others to “sketch at him.” Tales of his far chances 
with Tom Lawrence in El Hejas, for instance, had fol¬ 
lowed him up into Turkey, but no one knew his ten¬ 
dency to nausea in a pinch. 

Dicky had written a lot of big newspaper stories, but 
they were stories of the day. He had packed the films 
of tense and frightening and humorous moments away 
somewhere deep in his brain, to the end of massing 
them all into one—one day doing the Big Story, that 
139 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


had to do with finding a Man. That dream had held 
since the day he first saw Nagar. But in his heart of 
hearts everything was a side issue—world politics, 
world wars, newspaper stories, magazine stories, even 
the Big Story of all—compared to the war in himself 
over a girl named Pidge. He still had night sweats 
over the name of Rufus Melton. ... A quiet voice, 
a tired smile, a face darkened and dusty looking from 
exposure, even after a clean shave—out of this face, 
usually shadowed by a big cake-basket helmet of cork, 
shone a pair of steady eyes in a fine mesh of dusty 
brown wrinkles—Dicky at twenty-eight. 

He had scarcely stepped ashore at Bombay when he 
heard that the States had entered the war. He touched 
the sleeve of an Englishman who was looking up at the 
promenade deck of the ship with eyes and mouth wide 
open. 

“Tell me, I hadn’t heard,” Dicky said hoarsely. 

“She’s in, but I must say, sir, she took a long time 
about it.” 

“But that cannot be!” Dicky answered. 

Now the Englishman stared, this being the peerless 
rebuke. Moreover, he observed that the American had 
a sudden withered look, and presumed that he was a 
mere upstart person. Accordingly, the Englishman re¬ 
fixed his triple focus on the ship’s promenade deck, and 
Cobden tunneled into the bus for the King George . 
There he verified the news. He went to his room a bit 
whipped, quite a little bit whipped. He wanted to be 
alone. For two years he had written and felt for 
140 




A LETTER FROM PIDGE 


America as only an exile can. He had believed in her 
luck and native horse sense in the midst of the mess 
other countries were making of their national lives. 

Something snapped when he had been alone in his 
room for a while. It was Dicky’s romantic allegiance 
to the country of his school histories. For the present 
he was a man without national gravity, and a sick man 
since some hot, hard-held part of himself had been 
ripped out. 

He had missed his mail in Aden and left word for it 
to be forwarded to Bombay on the next steamer. A 
cablegram from his newspaper connection, rewired from 
Aden, not only counseled him to make haste to double 
back to France (to be on the spot to greet the first 
American military arrivals), but accepted it as settled 
that there was nothing else for a man of his equipment 
now to do. The message was actually elate with the 
“doings” ahead, but Dicky Cobden didn’t see it that 
way. The fact is, he was sore, personally sore, at what 
had happened and didn’t care who knew it. The follow¬ 
ing ship brought his mail, including a letter from Pidge 
Musser, which he opened with an old and ugly fear, 
and in this letter the worst that he had ever feared fell 
upon him: 


. . . Oh, Dicky, there is no other way. I’ve tried 
to dodge it, but it has to be told now, that I have taken 
Rufus Melton. Why did I do it? I don’t know, unless 
it is that I am evil and unfinished and answer to the evil 
and unfinished in him. He draws me terribly, but at 

141 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


the same time, I am not deluded. There is never a 
moment with him that is not unmixed with pain. . . . 
I wonder if you can believe that I did not do this thing 
for happiness; that the happiest moments I have ever 
known have come from my work with John Higgins 
and my friendship with you ? And can you ever believe 
that I am no farther from you now, in that mysterious 
comrade way? . . . Oh, Life is not like books, Dicky, 
not at all like what we are taught it is. I have a relation 
to him. I answer some terrible drawing need—like a 
child crying for me. But I have a relation to you, too, 
only different. You mean rest, something done. He 
means the unfinished. He brings a mirror to me, and 
says, “Look!” I want to scream, because the mirror 
brings out all my defects. That’s what his presence 
means. . . . This is one true thing, Dicky. The one 
who can rouse the most hell in your breast is the one 
to whom you belong for the time. At least, that is true 
to me. . . . Have I not been grateful for your stability? 
And have I not been proud for your moving so quietly 
up and down the East, keeping your surfaces clean for 
the world events to be pictured there without twist or 
falsehood? ... A strange door was opened in my 
being when I was a child. In and out that door, whether 
I will or not, you often come and go. “He is my 

friend,” I whisper, “my friend”- and repeat it a 

thousand times. 




XXIII 


THE RED ROOM 

INE by line the thing was killing him. He got 



up and crossed the heavy red carpet to the hall 


* door and turned the key in the lock. He was 
afraid some one would come in and find him. He had 
the strange power of partly seeing himself, as the sullen 
horrors of hatred and revolt boiled up in his breast. 
Vaguely, but quite well enough, he could watch the man 
called Richard Cobden in the dim hotel room, the 
shoulders hunched, the mouth stretched and crooked; 
unable to sit still, the face wet with poisonous sweat. 

The love had gone out of him, and with it, all the 
light he had. He thought he had known pain and lone¬ 
liness since leaving New York, but all he had known 
was humming content compared to now, because there 
had been a laughing idolatry for all her ways and 
words, a reliance upon her that he had dared to call 
absolute. “Understand, understand!” she had cried 
all through the letter. . . . Oh yes, he could under¬ 
stand. She wasn’t what he had made her out to be— 
that was clear enough. He had built upon something 
which wasn’t there. He had believed her to be—built 
into himself the conviction—that she was the honestest 
thing alive, and here she was- 


143 



THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


His thought shot back to the night of the Punjabi 
dinner. That little basement room was devastated 
before his mind, the table overturned, the face of Miss 
Claes a mockery, the face of Pidge Musser—that of 
an American girl found out. Into the center of his 
consciousness was now flung his old promise not to hate. 
... He heard his own laughter. He saw his own 
stretched and twisted mouth from which it came. Like 
a couple of sly schoolgirls, they looked at him now— 
Pidge and Miss Claes — slyly pulling together and 
duping a fat boy. . . . 

He saw his room key upon the table. Number Five, 
it was, the fifth floor. He looked around the dim 
papered wall—whitish-red like the pulp of raspberries 
—the deep upholstered chairs, the seats slightly crushed, 
the full-length mirror, the ash tray, the silver flask on 
the writing table, his own things here and there orderly 
enough—all but himself, a sort of maniacal Mr. Hyde. 
Number Five. He would remember this room where 
he had fought it out, too, about America entering the 
war. He poured brandy into a whisky glass. The 
stuff eased him a little. It made the pain all the more 
poignant, like a stove getting hotter, but also it seemed 
to give him the power to move back a little from the 
stove. . . . He stood up in the dark and shook him¬ 
self. 

“Oh, you ass!” he muttered. “You awful ass!” 

In the light of a match, as he lit a cigarette long after¬ 
ward, he saw the rest of his mail on the table, one letter 
from Miss Claes. He couldn’t get head nor tail out of 
144 




THE RED ROOM 


that at first. She seemed to be talking about something 
he had said about finding a Man. Oh, yes. He had 
written from Mecca, mentioning Tom Lawrence and his 
search for a Man. He snickered now at himself 
through the fogs of his own past and present. Then 
a line seemed to stand up before his eyes. “ ... If 
you go to India, go to Ahmedabad. Nagar is there. 
You are in danger of finding your Man.” Later that 
night, still in the dark, his back straightened. He 
laughed and said aloud, failing altogether for the mo¬ 
ment to see the absurdity of himself. 

“Number Five—queer little old musty room, I won¬ 
der who died here? . . . Good night, Pidge; good 
night, dear America—grand pair to tie to!” 

The next day he cabled to his newspaper connection 
that he was not returning to France for the opening 
campaign, at least; and wrote to John Higgins that 
he didn’t expect to send in much stuff for the present. 
“I may stay awhile in India—just looking around. 
She smells like a typhoid ward, and needs orderlies. 

. . . I’ll, of course, let you know what comes of my 
spectating” 

Still he did not start at once for Ahmedabad. He 
locked himself in Number Five through the days and 
walked the streets of Bombay at night, walked like a 
man in a strait-jacket. He wasn’t conscious of this 
at first, until he began to feel an ache from the tension 
of his neck and shoulder muscles and tightened elbows. 
When he forced himself to relax, however, the torture 
of his thoughts was accentuated. He had been holding 

M5 



THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


himself rigidly to help fend off the destroying rush 
of mental images. He walked himself into one sweat 
after another for the nights were hot and humid. The 
point of all his fighting was to keep Pidge Musser out 
of mind. Of course, he could not succeed. She came 
in by every door. She came in softly, she came in 
scornfully, she came in singing, scolding. Mostly she 
came in saying, “Why, don’t you see, Dicky, I am 
nearer and clearer than ever?” Then it was as if an 
isolated bit of shrapnel would explode in his brain. 

His whole fabric of world politics was demolished. 
It looked to him like a tapestry that has been hooked 
up out of a sewer—all that careful weaving and bal¬ 
anced pigmentation! Before the day of the letter he 
had prided himself that his building in the past two 
years was good and strong. Now he faced the pitiful 
discovery that every block of his building had been 
placed upon this platform: That even if he couldn’t 
have her, no one else could. This smelled to him now. 
Forever after, it smelled to him like the sewage lanes 
of old Bombay. 

Dicky had a good body. After two weeks his physi¬ 
cal vitality began to steal back. The love was gone, 
but out of the debris of Subramini’s Punjabi Fireplace, 
the face of Miss Claes came up faintly smiling again. 
Another letter came from her, which he read in dismal 
irony several times on the day before he took the train 
for Ahmedabad—the last day in Number Five, with 
its wall paper of raspberry crush. He couldn’t make 
sense out of the letter. She seemed to love Pidge, even 
146 





THE RED ROOM 


to respect her. Miss Claes wrote, “It gives me quiet 
joy to know that Nagar is near you. It will be good 
for him and good for you. A great dearness for you 
both goes from this house, as you sit and walk to¬ 
gether.” Miss Claes also repeated in her letter that 
“love never faileth”- 

All very pretty and possible, no doubt; it sounded 
good, but it was no longer his sort of a project. This 
wasn’t for the product of three generations of 
hardware merchants and manufacturers. Funny, he 
thought, how he had ever accepted visionary stuff like 
this. He would write Miss Claes some time how he 
had failed, but not now. On the night train, he felt 
India closing about him really for the first time. Once 
when the train stopped, he smelled the altogether in¬ 
describable earthiness of hills that had been sun baked 
all day, now letting it be known through the moistness 
of the night. It was vaguely like home to him; not 
home in America, but home on earth again, the faintest 
symptom of his reallegiance to life here, only known 
to one coming up out of sickness. In the early morn¬ 
ing he lay for a while after awakening in a sort of 
bodily peace. It was as if he had really rested a little, 
as if he had left behind some utterly miserable part of 
himself in the red room at Bombay. 

“A bit questionable,” he muttered whimsically, with 
the trace of a smile, “a bit shabby and questionable to 
leave a bundle, a black bundle like that, in Number Five 
—for some one else to stumble over.” 

He fell asleep again and reawoke with a curious 

147 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


sentence on his lips; something that he had forgotten 
a long time, something that Miss Claes used to say: 
‘‘Nobody knows Nagar—nobody.” 

“Nobody ever will,” he added, “if he doesn't talk 
any more than he used to.” 

Again at breakfast the faintest little quiver of or¬ 
ganic ease stole into him. The earth was very bright 
outside and the pot of tea that had been brought tasted 
actually sane. He had the feeling of being on the 
way somewhere, of having escaped something, as he 
watched India slip by from the window of his com¬ 
partment. . . . Then Ahmedabad, the station, a Hindu 
in white garments, almost taking him in his arms— 
laughing, talking like an American—Nagar talking! 




XXIV 


MISS CLAES SPEAKS 
NE Sunday morning about three weeks after 



the luncheon with John Higgins, during which 


Rufus Melton came to the Chop House, Pidge 
found Miss Claes alone in the basement front. 

“We’d like to come here to live. Is there any 
chance?” she asked. 

“Yes, it can be managed, I think.” 

Pidge regarded her with a kind of cold fixity and 
added: “We were married night before last. Rufe 
seems willing enough to come here. I hate to leave 
this house, but I didn’t think you had the rooms.” 


“I’ll make a place for you; a little place, at least. 
But, Pidge-” 


“Why haven’t you come to me all this time?” 

“I know how fond you are of Dicky Cobden. I 
haven’t hoped any one could understand.” 

“Being fond of Richard Cobden doesn’t make me 
less fond of you.” 

“How could I expect you to understand me, when I 
can’t understand myself?” Pidge demanded. “I am 
two people, and they are at war. ... No use lying 
about it. I fell for him, knowing him all the time. Not 


*49 


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for a minute did I lose track of what he is. But I 
wanted him. Something in me answered—that’s all.” 

“I’ve always loved that honest Pidge,” said Miss 
Claes. 

“Think, if you like, that it’s part of the evil in me 
that talks this way about him, but I am talking about 
myself, too.” 

“You could never see all this clearly—without ‘fall¬ 
ing for’ him, Pidge.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“I mean it would remain a hopeless, unfinished 
puzzle—if you had run away from Rufus Melton.” 

“I couldn’t run away. I wanted him,” Pidge re¬ 
peated. “But there’s another side. There’s something 
in him that I seem to have known from the beginning— 
something like a little child that I left somewhere ages 
ago. It keeps calling to me from his eyes, and I leave 
everything to go to it—everything that Dicky means 
and the world, even writing—I leave all that. And 
yet when I go, when I go to his arms, I lose the pur¬ 
pose. It’s as if the child that I run to—the irresistible 
thing that calls to me from his eyes—stops crying and 
stops needing me! Then I suddenly know that it must 
need me and not be gratified, ever to be helped. Oh, no 
one on earth could understand that. It’s insane.” 

“But, Pidge, I do understand.” 

“How can you?” 

“Because I have loved like that, because I have had 
experience. I loved an English boy in the same way— 
oh, long ago. I love him still, but I could not stay with 
150 




MISS CLAES SPEAKS 


him, because he—why, Pidge, it is just the same. He 
needs to cry for some one, for something, otherwise he 
remains asleep in life.” 

“You’re saying this to help me.” 

“What I’ve lived through should help you. It was 
the hardest thing I’ve ever known—that I couldn’t 
forget everything and have him, just two alone in the 
world. But when I went to him, he was satisfied and 
looked elsewhere. I almost died of revolt.” 

Pidge’s eyes were very wide. “And when you didn’t 
go to him?” she said in slow tones. “What happened 
then ?” 

“It was then that he remembered and reminded me 
that I was half-caste. Also he looked elsewhere, just 
the same.” 

“And you still love him?” 

“Deep underneath—that is not changed.” 

“But what is Nagar?” 

“Nagar means the other world, Pidge—a new heaven 
and a new earth. He means the not-wanting love, the 
willing-to-wait love-” 

“I’m not like that,” Pidge said with old bitterness. 
“I want love in a room! I want to shut the world out. 
I don’t want the love of the world, but love that’s all 
mine. And I can’t—I can’t have it!” 

She was breathing deeply, staring at the fire. 

Miss Claes glanced at her wistfully a moment, her 
lips faintly smiling. The girl’s face had never been so 
lovely to her. It was like land that has had its rains 
after long waiting—soft blooms starting, an earthy 
I5i 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


sweetness rising in the washed sunlight. The begin¬ 
nings of both laughter and tears were in Pidge’s wide 
eyes; her red-brown hair, from which the henna was 
long forgotten, had an easy restful gleam in its coils. 

“Why, Pidge,” Miss Claes said at last, “you’re like 
one who has been born again. It’s wonderful. I had 
almost forgotten what that love does to a woman, at 
first—for a little, little time.” 

“And you knew that kind of love—with the English 
boy?” 

“Yes.” 

“And Nagar knows.” 

“Yes.” 

Pidge shivered. 

“. . . Rufe brings the fight to me, makes every un¬ 
done thing rise and live! He brings the most terrible 
disappointments, the crudest disorder, yet that which 
would pay for it all, if I were just a simple peasant 
woman, is denied. Why can’t we shut the door and 
just live? Why can’t there be a kingdom for two?” 

The form was soft and gliding in Miss Claes’ arms. 
The square-shouldered little figure of the mill and office 
girl had become almost eloquent with its emotional 
power. After a moment Pidge straightened, her face 
staring into Miss Claes’. 

“Why don’t you answer?” 

“I can only say, Pidge, you are called to learn the 
next step, the next lesson in what love means. You 
want the love that has two ends, but the Triangle is 
ready for you. Oh, many are learning the mystery 
152 



MISS CLAES SPEAKS 


of the Triangle. It hurts so at first, but it lets the 
world in—the bigger meanings of life.” 

Pidge shivered again. “Is it blasphemy,” she asked, 
“that I feel just as close to Dicky Cobden—as ever?” 

“No more than the finding of bread would spoil 
your taste for water.” 

Pidge said at last: 

“Oh, I don’t want to leave this house, Miss Claes. 
He says he’ll come here, too.” 

“I’ve been thinking of putting a bathroom on the 
third floor. There’s a tiny empty room like yours 
across the hall. The bath shall be installed there. You 
know I’ve kept Nagar’s room empty. It is pleasant 
and larger than yours. I’ll have a door cut through 
the partition, and with a bath across the hall you will 
do well enough for a time.” 

“You would give us Nagar’s room?” 

“Nagar has the key to the whole house,” said Miss 
Claes. 

Moments afterward, Pidge’s strong fingers closed 
over the hands of the other. 

“No one can know how it hurts me—to think of 
Dicky-” 

“He is with Nagar now.” 

“Do you think—can it be possible that Nagar will 
help him—as you help me?” 

“Nagar and the Little Man,” said Miss Claes. 





XXV 


“BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE” 

T HEY were ensconced in the two upper rooms. 

Pidge kept up her work at The Public Square, 
and did not come home for luncheon. She 
had told John Higgins of her marriage but the subject 
was not mentioned afterward. The old chief vanished 
for three days following the news, and when he came 
back there was a new dignity on his part for Pidge to 
cope with. She found her position a trifle uncentered. 
His old stenographer took his letters, and he wrote his 
editorials on his own machine as aforetime. John Hig¬ 
gins said little, but found flaws in her judgments that 
had not appeared before. He no longer risked avail¬ 
ing himself of her entire equipment; this change being 
apparently on the basis that he dare not get used to it 
all over again. He seemed to hold the idea that it was 
only a question of days at most before a married woman 
would forget place and town entirely and rush off to 
pick up pieces of wool and thread for a nest. 

Pidge had built so much of herself into her work 
that there was emphatic pain in the new conditions. 
She needed the work more than ever now, but The 
Public Square was falling into sorry days and ways. 
154 


“BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE” 


There was nothing to say but War, and if you didn’t 
like War, didn’t see the divine uses of War and say so, 
you had better say nothing. There was no field in the 
world at this time for a magazine of dignified or any 
other kind of protest, and in the steady loss of money 
week after week, the struggle became one of great sim¬ 
plicity—to stay alive. 

“Higgins is a rotten old knocker anyway,” said 
Rufus Melton. “This is a time for Americans to stand 
together and not criticize the government. He never 
did pay any real money for his stuff, but was always 
ready to tell you where you fell down. They’re telling 
him a word or two now.” 

So Pidge didn’t speak much of The Public Square 
at home. 

Rufus vibrated between a depression when his stuff 
wouldn’t come through and an exaltation when it did. 
He was quite sincere in his industry, but slept late in 
the morning. Pidge was up and away four mornings 
out of five without waking him. Sometimes Rufe de¬ 
cided to eat his “big meal of the day” in the middle of 
the afternoon, in which case Pidge supped alone. He 
was slow to get his work started, so that it was often 
evening before he got “all of himself working at once.” 
Then he was apt to stay with it for several hours, in 
which case Pidge could sleep if she got a chance. Oc¬ 
casionally he found that he could dictate a bit of first 
draft and Pidge undertook at first to help him in this 
way, but when she perceived that it didn’t occur to him, 
in the flush of his evening powers, that she had worked 
155 



THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


all day and must work to-morrow, she decided to stay 
off his night work. 

“I can’t, Rufe,” she said one night on the way to 
bed. “It’s so fascinating to practice napping in the 
hushes and rushes of your machine.” 

“You won’t take this stuff?” 

“No” 

“You won’t?” 

“It will interfere with your work session if you lose 
your temper. Of course, we’ve got the whole upper 
floor to start something in, but we must think of your 
story.” 

“Whose work counts in this outfit?” he demanded. 

“Yours, Rufe, by all means. A fine patriotic short 
story at any price. But I have a job to look after, and 
I can’t give them a red-headed somnambulist to-mor¬ 
row. No, I’m going to sleep, but I do hope you get the 
American flags waving all right in your story.” 

“I’ll get you, Pan—for acting like this.” 

“You’ve got me, dear, and don’t forget to have the 
hero come through with, ‘My country right or wrong.’ 
No girl can resist that—or editor. Good night.” 

Rufe was rarely rough. He didn’t overtire or over¬ 
stimulate himself, so that his temper could easily break 
corral; and at its worst this temper wasn’t a man-eater. 
Rufe’s nervous system was cushioned in a fine layer of 
healthy fat, and therefore didn’t flog itself to madness 
against bare bone and sinew. He was merely involved 
in himself entirely, which makes any man naive. 

Pidge wasn’t missing any of the petty dramas of her 




“BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE” 


present experience. When she came home the first 
time to find that he had already had dinner, something 
flew out of her into space in a frantic search for God. 
When she realized that he saw nothing but undisturbed 
equity in the idea of using her for his own work pur¬ 
poses half the night, when she was contracted to The 
Public Square for the days—another output of herself 
was loose in the solar system. When she came to under¬ 
stand that the tens he was earning were mysteriously 
his own, and that her ones were theirs—another day, at 
least, was spoiled for her in the editorial rooms. 

Rufe thought her extremely selfish. So had her 
father. “Two to one,” she said. “They’ve got it on 
me. They’ve got it on all of us. This is their world.” 

. . . She thought of all this bitterness and bickering 
taking place in Nagar’s room, which Miss Claes had 
saved for weeks for a sort of sanctuary of her own. 
Mostly she was hurt by the deadly parallel of this life, 
with her life in Los Angeles and vicinity. To cope 
with this American story-man, she was forced to draw 
out and readjust and refurbish the old hateful mecha¬ 
nism that had formed within her during the nineteen 
years with her father. She knew how. The mecha¬ 
nism worked all right, but the sense of the hateful thing 
resuming activity within her was far harder to bear 
than the racket of Rufe’s typewriter when she was try¬ 
ing to sleep. 

The fact that Rufe Melton was entirely cut off from 
the play of her real powers; that he thought her ridicu¬ 
lous, and said so, when she gave any notice of holding 
157 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


other than the standard American points of view on 
politics and religion and social ethics; this was not so 
serious a breach between them, as it would have been 
to a woman who had not come into so startling a reac¬ 
tion as Pidge had, against the whole system of knowing 
and not doing. All the knowledge that really mattered 
to Pidge was that working doctrine which doesn’t an¬ 
nounce or explain, but shows itself in living the life. 
She was very sad, and continually sad, that she had to 
work upon Rufe the iron of irony, the stab so subtle 
that it astonishes before it hurts, and the self-control 
which disarms. 

Sometimes Sundays or in unexpected periods of 
leisure they had moments of actual delight together. 
This occasionally happened when food just pleased him, 
or when an acceptance from a magazine arrived at a 
price which he considered adequate. (Rufus never 
neglected the price of his things, as an indication of his 
getting on.) He uncovered a real levity at such times, 
and their talk didn’t walk merely, then; it danced. 

“ We’ll go up to Harlem,” he said one Sunday morn¬ 
ing. ‘T used to live up there in the colored settle¬ 
ment-” 

Figuratively speaking, Pidge waved her hand before 
her own eyes to shut out the critical negatives which 
always arose when Rufe told of living somewhere. 
They went and stayed gay. When he turned from her 
innocently to consult a policeman in Harlem, she 
checked the first and last, “I told you so.” They found 
yams that day—yams freshly arrived from Georgia, 

158 




“BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE” 


and coffee said to be parched and dripped according to 
an ideal of New Orleans first families. These satis¬ 
fied Rufus, and still they stayed gay. Even his, “I 
could take you around to a lot of queer dumps in this 
man’s town,” didn’t upset anything. Altogether that 
day was memorable. . . . Once in desperate fatigue, 
when there were moving dark spots before her eyes in 
every ray of daylight, Pidge cried to Miss Claes: 

“But he is lost to everything, entirely oblivious to 
everything but himself and his work—his stories, his 
fame, his winning his way!” 

“I know, Pidge, but the world is on top of him yet. 
He is fighting his way up and out. Romance can’t be 
entirely satisfying, you know, when it has ambition for 
a rival. You’ve told me something about the thrall of 
a book in yourself—how engrossing it is.” 

“That all goes out of me when I’m with him,” Pidge 
said suddenly. “I never thought of it before, but all 
that old agony to produce another book that I used to 
feel is gone. I seem to let him carry all that.” 

“That helps for the present, doesn’t it?” 

“Yes, and it isn’t all sordid—don’t think I mean that, 
Miss Claes. Sometimes when he’s satisfied with his 
story, so that he can forget it, we have such good times. 
He’s such a playboy, such a playmate. Some old ter¬ 
rible longing comes over me when we are close like that, 
just to be like one of the Mediterranean women, who 
know nothing but to replenish the earth. But it doesn’t 
do to dwell on that,” Pidge finished with an impressive 
159 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


quietness of tone. “One thing I learned rather well, 
before it was too late.” 

“What’s that, Pidge?” 

“That this isn’t the time or place for us to bring a 
little baby into the world.” 




XXVI 


THE HANGING SOCK 

N AGAR was changed. On the day that Rich¬ 
ard Cobden reached Ahmedabad, he encoun¬ 
tered one of the surprises of his life. It was 
like meeting a man out in the freedom of the world, 
whom one had only known before in prison. Two 
years in the East had sharpened Dicky’s eyes to note 
something in Nagar’s face that he had been unable to 
detect before. Dicky called it cleanliness and calm, but 
this brought up the old difficulty which he never missed 
in his work of writing—that at best, words only sug¬ 
gest, only intimate. 

In America Nagar had looked dark; here he looked 
fair. There he had moved in and out as one of the 
colored men; here he was one of the elect. There he 
had lived in the midst of silences and mysterious inhi¬ 
bitions, diminished by the garments of Western civili¬ 
zation; here he was white-robed in the sunlight, like 
young Gautama in his father’s garden. Of course, 
Dicky knew that the change was more substantial than 
that of garb or place. He could only repeat that Nagar 
seemed free in his own mind. 

In the first few moments at the station in Ahmeda¬ 
bad, Dicky had himself felt unwashed and unwhole- 
161 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


some, as no man ever made him feel before. His hand 
went up to his chin. Yes, he had shaved that morning, 
but realizing it did not help much. It wasn’t the grime 
of travel that hurt him, but the smear of his recent men¬ 
tal and emotional overturning, the ugliness of all those 
days in the red room at Bombay, and the sense of fail¬ 
ure and loss he lived with constantly since the coming 
of the letter from Pidge. 

“. . . And the Little Man is actually here in Ahmeda- 
bad, and not a myth?” Dicky had asked, as they drew 
out of the crowd at the station. 

“Not only that, but you are to go to the Ashrama 
now, if you will. He is eager to have you come.” 

“His house first?” Dicky asked. 

“It is also the house in which I live,” said Nagar. 

“You mean you wish to put me up in your quarters?” 

“If you would not mind our great simplicity.” 

“Thanks, I should like that,” said Dicky, “but I 
think it would be better for me to follow the usual 
course of a foreigner and find hotel quarters.” 

The Entresden was not crowded and Dicky obtained 
comfortable quarters in a northeast room where the 
upholstering was covered in clean tan linen, and the 
punkahs showed signs of life immediately upon their 
entrance. Nagar prepared to leave as soon as Dicky 
sat down in the air crossing between two shaded win¬ 
dows. 

“I will come for you this afternoon if you wish to 
go to the Ashrama to-day,” he said. “It is some dis¬ 
tance from the center of the city.” 

162 




THE HANGING SOCK 


“Sit down, Nagar; don’t hurry off.” 

“I thought you would prefer to rest until after 
tiffin” 

“Stay and we’ll have it here. You’ll pour the tea 
like the old days in Miss Claes’ room.” 

Nagar’s face was in the shadows, but there was a 
soft shining as of polished silver in or around his eyes. 
At times, shutting his eyes as Nagar spoke, Dicky could 
almost believe he was back in the basement A Harrow 
Street. The way Nagar said to him, “my friend,” was 
almost Miss Claes herself. That was the poignant part 
of finding the Oriental again; that he brought back 
Harrow Street—even moments under the white light. 
The day would have been joyous but for the aching 
emptiness of heart. Dicky asked tirelessly about 
Gandhi, especially since it gave him such a chance to 
study the new Nagar. 

“Mahatma-ji has burned away all waste,” Nagar 
said at length. “He has narrowed himself down, body 
and mind, to an almost perfect obedience—self-control. 
He measures action to all his words. The best he 
knows, step by step, he performs.” 

“Where did you hear of him first?” 

“Here in India—of his work in South Africa. I 
went there to know him better—followed the gleam, as 
you might say. I stayed four years. It was he who 
encouraged me to go to America to study more of the 
spirit of the West.” 

“What’s Gandhi’s message to these people?” 

“He believes that politics cannot be successfully di- 
163 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


vorced from religion,” Nagar said. “His message al¬ 
ways is toward the spiritualizing of India’s political life 
and her institutions. The spiritual predominance of 
India, which he idealizes as being the real destiny of 
India, can only be effected by her rebecoming herself, 
by the return of the Motherland into herself, by her 
ceasing to imitate all the ways of western civilization.” 

“But if she returns into herself, making her own 
goods, cutting herself off from all institutions of the 
present government—England will be done for here.” 

Nagar bowed without the trace of a smile. 

“I’ve heard that every turn of a spinning-wheel in 
India takes part of a turn from a power loom in Man¬ 
chester,” Dicky added. 

Nagar further acquiesced. 

“And that isn’t politics? ... I think I’ll go in 
for religion, myself.” 

“It is very good to have you here,” Nagar said 
later. “Mahatma-ji will also be glad. He has asked 
much about you and believes that you may be a means 
of making many in America understand. It is a saying 
;with us here that 'to understand is to love.’ ” 

“But I didn’t come here with any set idea, you 
know.” 

“The work you will do for us in America will be the 
better for that. The more reason and rationale you 
bring-” 

“Evidently it’s easy for one to go off his head where 
Gandhi is,” Dicky said. 

164 




THE HANGING SOCK 


“His effect on some is subtle and strong.” 

“I’ll keep a stiff bridle arm. Say, Nagar, have you 
stopped to think how I happen to be here to-day?” 

“Tell me, please.” 

“One hanging sock.” 

“I do not understand.” 

“One hanging sock. It was that which made me go 
out into the reception room in the first place, that day 
you brought the story to The Public Square. I heard 
the office boy say to J. H., 'He keeps pulling up his 
sock/ I went out to see. So that’s what made me go 
to Harrow Street, and meet Miss Claes and the rest 
and go to Africa, and come here. I believe that’s what 
started the World War.” 

Nagar laughed. “I always had such trouble in the 
early days with American clothing. I would get one 
part working and another would give way-” 

“But, Nagar, what made it so imperative for you to 
have the two hundred that day?” 

“A ship was leaving within twenty-four hours for 
the Mediterranean to connect with South African 
ports. Mahatma-ji was greatly in need of funds to 
carry on his work.” 

“I thought you were ill—possibly starving.” 

“I was ill from strain—self-consciousness. It was 
one of the hardest things I ever had to do—to stand up 
against America in the office of The Public Square ” 

“You certainly put it over. But what made you so 
silent in New York? It’s an actual shock to find you 
chatty and human, like this.” 

165 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“Certain of us in India are trained differently from 
American ways. You perhaps have read that in the 
Pythagorean schools, a period of silence was enjoined 
among the young men. It was so in my training. We 
seek to silence all opinions, all half-truths, all thinking, 
in fact, in order to Know . We postulate, of course, a 
center of Spontaneous Knowledge, or Genius, above 
the mind. To learn obedience to this, one takes a vow 
of silence-” 

“Ah, I remember! Pidge—Miss Musser—I mean 
Mrs. Melton, told me something of the kind!” 





XXVII 


THE MAHATMA AND THE MIRACLE 
OBDEN heard the voice before he saw the 



man. Standing in a darkened hall of the 


bungalow, spoken of as the Ashrama, the 
voice of one speaking English in easy cultured tones 
reached his ears. When the door opened, he saw sev¬ 
eral native young men sitting upon the floor and a 
wasted Hindu figure in the center—a little man in a 
thin turban more like a skullcap; a homespun loin cloth, 
his bare feet beneath him upon a mat of coarse cloth, a 
rough pillow at his back. The young men about him 
had risen, but the central figure merely lifted and ex¬ 
tended the hand. 

“Mr. Cobden from America,” Gandhi said. “Nagar- 
juna has made us eager to welcome you.” 

Even Nagar withdrew, but one of the boys returned 
bringing a chair. 

“If you don’t mind, I’ll try sitting on the floor, too,” 
Dicky told the latter. “I’d feel perched with Mr. 
Gandhi sitting below.” 

The Mahatma smiled. “I quite appreciate,” he said. 
“I hope you will find in India the same kindness that 
you gave Nagarjuna in New York.” 

Dicky had expected power; he found composure. 


167 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


His idea of power was perhaps in part a hang-over 
from a boyish ideal of a certain American financial 
executive. Nothing of that in this room; rather he was 
conscious of Gandhi’s frailness and smallness. This 
presence called forth impulses to be tender, to lower 
one’s voice, to hurry to bring anything wanted. He 
was shocked a little at the twisted, battered look of the 
features. The lips looked pulpy in parts and did not 
rest together evenly. The smile was curiously slow— 
tentative, like one in whom understanding dawns. Back 
of the iron-rimmed spectacles and tired eyes, so inured 
to pain, was the essence of fearlessness. This was the 
first commanding characteristic to the American. 

. . Fear,” Gandhi was saying, “fear of death 
makes us devoid both of valor and religion. There is 
no place for fear in the Satyagrahi’s heart.” 

“What is a Satyagrahi?” Cobden asked. 

“One who is devoted and pledged to truth, to Satya - 
graha. I coined the word, to express our purpose in 
South Africa. Satyagraha is the use of Love-force or 
Soul-force.” 

Curiously, Dicky felt the cleanness of the house, the 
peace of it, the humming of a charka in the next room, 
a symbol of that peace. He felt Gandhi’s face growing 
upon him out of the shadow, a face that had been dried 
cleanly by many suns, the features fashioned by a life 
of direct, unpredatory thinking—the face of a man in¬ 
capable, even in thought, of hitting below the belt. And 
now, there was to go with the hum of the charka, the 
168 




THE MAHATMA AND THE MIRACLE 


faint fragrance of dried fruit in the air, or that sweet¬ 
ness one breathes in the altitudes where the sun is shin¬ 
ing upon the great conifers. 

“The world has talked much of the omnipotence of 
God,” Mahatma-ji went on. “India, at last, is prepar¬ 
ing to put her faith to test. Passive resistance has been 
called the weapon of the weak; if this is so, the Soul is 
weaker than the flesh. Passive resistance calls upon its 
devotees to endure great suffering, even martyrdom and 
death. Those who believe it is too difficult to carry out 
do not trust the Soul. They are not moved by true 
courage.” 

There was no pose nor show, no straining for force, 
rarely an adjective or simile, no shadings of senses—a 
direct approach, inevitably direct. Dicky felt suddenly 
hopeless of ever understanding such directness. For 
the first time in his life, he realized that all his training 
to live and to write was less than straight. He had 
been taught half-tones, shadows to accentuate lights. 
Here was directness. 

Gandhi resumed: “It is the sacred principle of love 
which moves mountains. To us is the responsibility of 
living out this sacred law; we are not concerned with 
results.” 

“No such thing then as righteous anger?” Dicky 
asked. 

“There is not for us. Anger is the misuse of force. 
Anger in thought is an enemy to clear thinking, to 
understanding. To understand is to love. Anger in 
action tends to become violence, and violence is the 
169 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


negation of spiritual force. In fact, only those who 
eschew violence can avail themselves of their real pow¬ 
ers. Only those who realize that there is something in 
man which is superior to the brute nature in him, and 
that the latter always yields to it, can effectively apply 
this force, which is to violence, and therefore to all 
tyranny, all injustice, what light is to darkness. For 
the exercise of the purest Soul-force, prolonged train¬ 
ing of the individual Soul is an absolute necessity.” 

Just now Dicky was contending with the feeling that 
he was in the presence of an evangelist or healer. He 
had difficulty for the moment in recalling that Gandhi 
was world-trained; a lawyer of London’s careful mak¬ 
ing; an opponent of governments in South Africa; a 
man found powerful enough in his own person to be 
reckoned with by the established laws of men of high 
place. 

“We have many things to ask of England,” Gandhi 
said, “and she has promised us her attention, as soon as 
her present difficulties give her freedom of heart and 
hand to attend our wants here. To press our wants 
now, or to force our desires upon England in her crisis 
in Europe, would be taking an unfair advantage. So 
this is a time for us in India to cleanse and prepare 
ourselves for future action, sacrifice if necessary-” 

At one moment Gandhi’s face was dull and unattrac¬ 
tive as a camel driver’s; again it shone with a high 
clear calm, like the ideal most of us have of a saint or 
a priest. Now the instant came, as the words stopped, 
that Dicky seemed to be looking into the Indian face 
170 




THE MAHATMA AND THE MIRACLE 


actually for the first time, and Gandhi was looking into 
him. The American was uncentered for a second or 
two, as he had once felt in the quick sag of an airplane 
in a bit of rough going. 

It began to become clear to the caller that there were 
only a few constantly vibrating themes in this man’s 
talk: the necessity for nonviolence; the control of self, 
essential before the control of others can be contem¬ 
plated; the establishment of altruism as a basis for all 
political activity; the return of India into her own des¬ 
tiny of a handicraft civilization, which involved the 
making and using of her own goods and the turning of 
her back upon the “monster of a mechanical civiliza¬ 
tion”; freedom of speech, devotion to truth, fearless¬ 
ness, always that. 

Dicky now actually contemplated the look of un¬ 
earthly calm in the eyes of the man before him. Was 
it fanaticism—this fearlessness which Gandhi put into 
practice? Was there a soul-calm back of the human 
nervous system, a central calm that a man could reach 
and abide in, that made anything negligible that men 
might do to the body? Was there something really 
that Miss Claes and Nagar and this man talked about 
—something that went on and on, that loved one’s 
enemies, that loved one’s love, no matter what this life 
effected to keep them apart ? Was it worth going after, 
since every ordinary viewpoint seemed changed in those 
who had touched it? . . . Surely India was getting 
him going—he, Dicky Cobden, of the family of trowel 
makers! In amazement, he realized that he was re- 
171 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


sponding to some stimulus like the finest wine—that if 
he didn’t get out of here soon, he would fall to telling 
his troubles like a man who has had too many drinks. 

Gandhi was speaking of his workers and devotees 
here in Ahmedabad; the manner of their life together: 

‘‘So in our Ashrama ” he explained, “every child is 
taught to understand political institutions and to know 
how his country is vibrating with new emotions, with 
new aspirations, with new life. ... As for men and 
women living and working together in the Ashrama, 
they must live the celibate life whether married or un¬ 
married. Marriage brings a woman close together with 
a man, and they become friends in a special sense, never 
to be parted in this life or in the lives to come; but I 
do not think that into that place of life, our lusts should 
necessarily enter.” 

Dicky had scrambled to his feet from the floor. 

“I won’t take your time any more just now,” he 
mumbled haltingly. 

Mahatma-ji watched him with a look of gentlest 
understanding. 

Dicky backed out. He was in the street alone. . . . 
The young men had not restrained him in the slightest. 
They had seemed to understand that he must be alone. 
Even Nagar had only walked at his side a moment in 
the hall, to say that he would come to the Entresden 
after dinner. . . . He was alone in the outskirts of the 
city with the miracle. Somewhere among Gandhi’s 
sentences about men and women, it had happened— 
172 




THE MAHATMA AND THE MIRACLE 


somewhere in there, when he had spoken about—yes, 
that was it, “about friends in a special sense! . . 

A pariah dog yelped, running out of a doorway, al¬ 
most banging into his knees. He was in a narrow 
street, and had to step upon a doorsill, while two men 
passed dragging at a cart. He saw their bare ribs and 
salt-whitened loin cloths. The sun was still high; the 
stillness and heat almost fetid in the byways. He 
passed a native market place by the river, and out of all 
the moving multicolored crowd, he remembered only 
one parasol of jade green, though he did not see the 
face beneath. 

His American-trained mind scoffed against the thing 
that had happened, but his heart held on serenely. . . . 
What did this little world-warrior with the battered 
mouth know about love and living with a woman? 
What did he know about lusts that he spoke so freely 
of? Did he ever give three years of his life to the one 
battle—not to hate the woman he loved most under 
heaven? Or was that particular battle so far back in 
his experience that he merely spoke of it as one skirmish 
in the great campaign of fifty years, called Life? 

Alone at dinner at the Entresden, Dicky conned every 
word the Little Man had spoken about the young mar¬ 
ried people who worked together in the Ashrama, of 
the celibacy they vowed themselves to, of their becom¬ 
ing through marriage “friends in a special sense—for 
this and all lives.” Yes, Gandhi talked as if it were a 
foregone conclusion that there were other lives. . . . 

He wasn’t tasting his dinner. . . . He came up from 
173 




HE PUBLIC SQUARE 


the deeps of reflection to realize a waiter was coming 
toward him, as if in answer to a signal. He also dis¬ 
covered that he had been sitting over his filled plate with 
one hand lifted—the thumb and fingers brushing to¬ 
gether, as if he were close to her, and it was a bit of 
her dress or a wisp of her hair between his fingers. 
His mind could scoff all it pleased, for his heart held 
serenely to the miracle, and this was the miracle: that 
Pidge Musser, married or not married, was back alive 
in his heart; and such a melting pity for her plight had 
come to him as he sat before the Little Man, that he, 
the hardheaded, had to rise abruptly from the interview 
and rush away, lest he fall to weeping and explain¬ 
ing all. 






XXVIII 


THE RACK OF SEX 

D ICKY and Nagar sat under the punkahs in the 
room at the Entresden —that stillest, hottest 
night. A fierce stimulus was driving the 
American. Moment by moment he realized it more 
clearly—that his love had come: back to him, or some 
strange new fire from it, as he had talked with Mahat- 
ma-ji. It compelled him, mind and emotion now, and 
his questions were insatiable, but he was slow and 
roundabout in getting to the core of matters that fasci¬ 
nated. 

“For instance, what makes him starve himself ?” 
Dicky asked. 

“He has no illusions about fasting,” Nagar an¬ 
swered. “Mahatma-ji objects to the distractions of 
the body. He keeps down this drum of the senses by 
severity of handling, an old well-tried way of the East. 
Ask an expert horseman what to do with a spirited 
saddle horse that has a tendency now and then to take 
the bit and run away. ‘Cut down his grain, and he will 
be easier to handle/ you will be told.” 

Dicky was groping feverishly within himself as the 

other talked. “But what has celibacy to do-” he 

halted and finished, “with politics and all that?” 

175 



THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“Mahatma-ji has made himself free from the rack 
of sex and the drum of the senses—enough to realize 
his great work for others, for India. We who follow 
him wish to do the same. We understand that we have 
not the great gift for India, until we are free; that is, 
only a man who has freed himself from his own desires 
can help greatly to free others, or his country. We are 
not free agents so long as we are on the rack of sex. 
We cannot hate ourselves off that rack; in fact, we 
must learn to love more, not less, to escape.” 

“Tunnel,” Dicky said. “No man educated on the 
Hudson can get that sort of thing. Have a heart, 
Nagar.” 

“It is my poor telling-” 

Dicky smiled and smoked: “I can’t see how he’d have 
anything left to give the world,” he added—“a man 
who got on top of himself that way.” 

The thing that Dicky had found in the same room 
with the Little Man wasn’t happiness, but it was better 
than the deadness he had known; good to feel the tis¬ 
sues of his heart alive again, not a leaden lump. 

Again the next day, he went to sit with Mahatma-ji, 
but nothing happened, though he remained two hours. 
On one side he had come to doubt the whole business; 
on the other he had been naive enough half to believe 
that all he had to do was to enter the presence of the 
Indian leader to get this living thing back in his heart, 
this pain that had the breath of life in it. Two days 
176 




THE RACK OF SEX 


afterward, however, while he was deeply involved with 
Gandhi’s explanation of Satyagraha, taking notes so 
that he could put down the other’s words almost exactly, 
the sense of Pidge Musser’s presence and plight was 
suddenly with him again, renewed within him, the pity 
of it almost more than he could endure. 

There were hours also when Dicky could believe 
almost anything at the Ashrama, where he was per¬ 
mitted to sit with the native students (Gandhi often 
halting his speech in Hindi or Guzerati, to talk English 
for the American’s benefit). And occasionally during 
long evening talks with Nagar, on the banks of the 
Sabarmati or under the muffie-winged punkahs in the 
Entresden room, Dicky’s mind had sudden extensions 
of range. Still he had a vague foreboding that he 
would not be able to hold all this hopeful stuff when he 
was away from India, for slowly and surely he was 
being pressed to depart. 

“America needs your loyalty now,” Nagar said. 
“We will send for you to come when the curtain rises 
here. The drama of India is not being played now, but 
the Play is written. This that you have heard, so far, 
is only a rehearsal of minor parts.” 

In June, a letter came from The Public Square, press¬ 
ing its correspondent to return to France, or at least to 
some of the points where the American troops were 
gathering. 


. . . As for magazine conditions, Dicky [John 

Higgins wrote], they couldn’t be worse. Our little old 
177 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


Public Square has fallen into sorry ways. ... If 
you’ve had a German neighbor for thirty years and 
learned cautiously to respect the beast, you’re supposed 
now to know him no more, in trade or whist or home 
or club, nor his woman nor children. Old England’s 
bloomed out more seductive than ever, and this coun¬ 
try’s infatuated. You couldn’t believe it. We’re more 
English than Canada right now. She’s borrowed every¬ 
thing in sight and is so tickled over herself that she’s 
beginning to laugh at us already. It’s a fact, her big 
business men can’t keep the joke any longer. . . . But 
I only meant to tell you that The Public Square has 
nothing to say, nothing to do. We tried a critical study 
of the architecture of a federal building in Des Moines, 
and we’re being looked into for unpatriotic motives. 
A lot of American business men, who once gloried in 
their breadth and toleration, have taken positions in 
what they call the Department of Justice, and their 
business is to probe into speeches and writings like ours. 
They are looking for heresies of citizenship. If we're 
not suspended for making a croak, we’ll likely be forced 
to suspend for not having the breath. Otherwise, we’re 
quite well, and the trade world—you ought to be able 
to hear American business boom, even in India—if 
-you’re not too far inland. 

For the first time John Higgins’ views looked dimin¬ 
ished to Dicky Cobden’s eyes. This personal treason 
he laid to India. He made an arrangement, however, 
to help The Public Square to keep alive. . . . Gandhi 
was called to Lucknow, and Dicky saw him into his 
third-class coach, with a catch in his throat and a sad- 
178 




THE RACK OF SEX 


ness of heart. A day or two later he left Nagar at the 
station where he found him—and the day looked dull 
and gloomy from the windows of the Bombay Inter 
Provincial, as the American started south alone. 




XXIX 


RUFUS’ PLAY DAY 

R UFUS MELTON was having his coffee at 
Miss Claes’ table. It was noon and July, 
^ 1917. The package of mail left at 54 Har¬ 
row Street had not forgotten Rufus this morning. 
Another story had gone through, and he felt that the 
day was all right. It looked to him like a very good 
day to play and to shop. Miss Claes came in from the 
kitchen in a fresh white dress and canvas shoes, nor did 
she come empty handed. A crystal and silver marma¬ 
lade jar was in one hand, and a plate of cold ham in the 
other. These she placed on the cloth before him; and 
noting that the loaf of rye bread lay uncut upon the 
board, she went to a drawer for the knife. 

Rufus dropped a cube of sugar into his coffee cup 
and contemplated Miss Claes’ ankle. His mind became 
industrious. He was thinking how he would describe 
the ankle if he were using it in a story. He thought of 
several narrow white things. There was a white grey¬ 
hound, but you couldn’t say a woman’s ankle was like 
that. There was a white pleasure yacht on the river, 
with narrow lines and clipper bow that bore a psycho¬ 
logical likeness, but it would take a paragraph to put 
that over. The boneheads would think of boiler plate. 
180 


RUFUS’ PLAY DAY 


Then there was a birch tree and a polar bear and a 
snowy church spire . . . anyway the ankle was fetch¬ 
ing. 

“You look great this morning, Miss Claes, and see 
here-” 

He spread out his letter from a most rich and inac¬ 
cessible editorial room. 

“How interesting, Rufus. You are doing so well 
with your stories.” 

“Pidge thinks they’re rotten,” he chuckled. 

No comment from Miss Claes. 

“She’d have me sit in a cave and growl over a story 
—bringing one out every three months for editors to 
muss their hair over and finally turn down. That’s the 
life-” 

Miss Claes had turned to the cabinet of dishes, the 
double doors of which were open. One might have 
thought that Rufus was now entirely involved in the 
subject of Pidge’s idea of stories, but in reality he was 
studying Miss Claes’ waist and throat and profile. Her 
particular freshness from boots up this morning fasci¬ 
nated his eye. She took his coffee cup to the kitchen 
to be refilled, and when she came back close to his chair, 
Rufus’ arm moved engagingly around her hips, his face 
turning up with a questioning boyish smile. 

“What is it, Rufus?” she asked, making no move¬ 
ment to be free from his arm. 

“You’re mighty charming this morning-” 

“It’s a charming morning.” 

His arm tightened a little, yet she stood perfectly 
181 







THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


still. Rufus was now in a quandary. This sitting pos¬ 
ture had its diminishing aspect: yet to arise and disen¬ 
tangle his feet from under the table, he must loosen his 
arm or show an uncouth line to the camera, so to speak. 
Rufus rarely broke his rhythms in these little perform¬ 
ances ; certainly not when the going was as delicate as 
this. Miss Claes had become especially desirable, be¬ 
cause of an exciting uncertainty about her, and an af¬ 
fectation, at least, of allegiance to Pidge. If he had 
only had sense enough to turn his chair around, before 
taking her in. Presently Rufus reached the conclusion 
that it was better to draw her down to him, than take 
a chance of getting his arm around her again. 

She came—no resistance, no rigidity. His lips found 
her shadowy cheek, and an indescribable and most dis¬ 
turbing fragrance from her neck and hair. Or was it 
the extraordinary coolness of everything that disturbed, 
or the words gently whispered in his ear: 

“You’re such a lonely boy. You don’t understand at 
all what you are really dying for.” 

Rufe was disappointed. So hers was the mothering 
game. Besides his position was uncomfortable, knees 
under the table, and his coffee was getting cold. So he 
let her go after all, in order to reach a standing posture, 
but by the time he was free of the chair and the table, 
Miss Claes had vanished without haste into the kitchen. 
Rufus now stood dangling inconveniently between his 
breakfast and her return. 

She came; he went to her. Her dark eyes were ut¬ 
terly calm, no traceable deepening of the color in her 
182 




RUFUS’ PLAY DAY 


face. She halted, but lightly held in the two hands be¬ 
fore her was a gold-edged dish, with a little golden 
globe of butter in the center. 

Rufus dropped back in his chair and lifted his coffee 
cup. What on earth could a man do with a woman 
holding a butter dish? “It’s hell to be fastidious,” he 
thought, in regard to his own inhibitions. 

Something delectable had gone out of the July day. 
Miss Claes was no nearer his understanding than be¬ 
fore. Pidge would have the laugh on him, because 
these women could never keep anything to themselves. 
He didn’t mind anything about Pidge so much as her 
laugh. Altogether, this little brush at breakfast left 
him unsatisfied—and this was a play day. 

“Thanks,” he said at the door. 

She gave him a pink, an old-fashioned white one. 
“The butter-and-egg-man brought in some from his 
dooryard garden in Yonkers,” she said. 

Rufe started upstairs. 

There were voices from one of the rooms on the 
main floor, but the second was entirely empty and silent 
until a rear door opened and Fanny Gallup looked out. 

“Hello,” she said in a far-reaching whisper. 

Fanny’s “hello” was one of the best of her little 
ways. She said it, as one would cast a silken noose. 

Rufe looked back and down. On certain mornings 
he would have growled an answer and tramped on, but 
there was something white and calling about the face 
in the dim shadows this morning, and for a wonder the 
kids weren’t squalling. 


183 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“Oh, come in. Come on in!” was in his ears. Her 
bare arm was raised and he saw the little muffler of 
dark in the pit of it. The lacing was gone from the 
smock, moreover, and there was a pull for the moment 
to Fanny’s sad little breast. The fact that the smock 
had once been Pidge’s, Rufe thrust back into his mind 
for future reference. He halted, looking around and 
listening again. Then he tiptoed in and the door was 
shut. Not a great while afterward the door was opened, 
the crying of children was heard. Fanny was moan¬ 
ing, “Don’t go ’way—oh, don’t go ’way!” 

But Rufus breasted past her muttering within him¬ 
self, “Never again!” 

. . . Pidge and Rufe Melton went over to Bank 
Street for supper that evening. Rufus wasn’t hun¬ 
gry. He had bought a golf suit that looked very well 
on him, he said, but evidently now he was troubled how 
to use it. He hadn’t done any work so far to-day and 
felt less like it than ever. Pidge thoughtlessly men¬ 
tioned that an Indian letter had come in to the office 
from Richard Cobden that day. 

“You folks are dippy about this Cobden,” Rufe said. 
“Every time an article of his comes out in the Passe 
Square, you gather together to read it as if it had come 
from the Messiah. What’s he to you, Pan—a little bit 
tender on your Dicky?” 

“A little bit tender,” she said. 

Rufus felt abused. He glared at her. This sort of 
thing had happened before. Rufe had come to look at 
184 




RUFUS’ PLAY DAY 


Pidge as his picket pin. He had a long rope and every¬ 
thing was all right, so long as the pin held. But her 
manner now would uncenter any man. 

“I’d like to get out of Harrow Street,” he growled. 
“Every time I put my address on the top of a manu¬ 
script, I feel it’s a knock rather than a boost. Eve been 
tempted to get an agent, for no other reason than to 
have his address for the magazines to work through. 
I was talking with Redge Walters who bought this 
story to-day, and he said, ‘Rufe, you sure fall for the 
little bobbed heads down in the Village, don’t you? 
Why don’t you come uptown and live in New York?’ ” 

“I like Harrow Street,” said Pidge. 

“You don’t make a secret of it, either,” he went on. 
“Of course, Miss Claes is kind and all that, but we pay 
for what we get, and there’s no question in my mind 
about the pictures in her gallery being hung crooked.” 

“If you’ve finished your supper, let’s go,” said Pidge. 

“She breathes! The Arctic princess!” Rufe shiv¬ 
ered. 

Pidge didn’t answer. 

“And that second floor needs policing up,” Rufe re¬ 
sumed. “I haven’t taken it to heart so much about 
living in the Village, but that second floor’s a tenement 
patch. Every time I go up and down-” 

“Fanny’s my fault and Miss Claes accepts it with 
never a murmur,” Pidge said, wide-eyed. “I’d look 
well running off uptown and leaving Fanny there. Oh, 
Rufe, don’t you ever see any fault except on the out¬ 
side?” 


185 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


Right then Rufe said something. 

“What’s the use of me looking after my own faults 
when you’ve got them all in hand like Shetland ponies ?” 

Pidge arose. Black waters were welling up in her 
breast. It was so true. His faults were with her day 
and night, and the greatest of them was his entire 
irresponsibility. Also it touched her in the sorest quick 
to have him point out that Fanny lowered the values, 
not only of the second floor, but of the whole Harrow 
Street house. 

Pidge never passed Fanny’s door but she was pressed 
by something within to enter; yet her whole personal 
nature rebelled. Often for hours at her work, there 
was a gloomy semiconscious activity within her that 
kept urging its notice up to her mind. When she 
stopped to think, she would realize that she hadn’t gone 
into Fanny’s room that day, or that she must drop in 
to-night. It was so now, only more than ever, because 
Rufe had located her private horror and brought it to 
speech. On the second floor, returning from supper, 
she told Rufe to go on up, that she meant to see Fanny 
for a few minutes. 

“What to—come on, Pan, let’s go to a show some¬ 
where!” he said suddenly. 

She shook her head. 

“There isn’t a clot of work stirring in my brain pan,” 
he went on. 

“I don’t want to go out. I’ve got to see Fanny-” 

He caught her sleeve. “It’s too hot to go up. Let’s 

go somewhere. Let’s get on a bus and go uptown-” 

186 




RUFUS’ PLAY DAY 


She was too occupied in the thing she hated to do, 
to notice his concern. He spoke again: 

“I’m not going up there alone. You’re colder than 
a frog to live with anyway-” 

“Go out somewhere, Rufe, if you want to. Don’t 
mind me.” 

She didn’t hear his words, but she heard the crying 
of Fanny’s children. The door opened. Fanny stood 
there, but looked past her, over Pidge’s shoulder, and 
queerly enough Pidge thought of the words, “And Jove 
nods to Jove.” The hall door was then shut. 

“Wot you coming in here for—to scold me some 
more, Redhead?” 

“No, Fanny, to see you and the--” 

“I know why you come, all right. To find fault— 
that’s why, and you needn’t kill yourself, because Pm 
gettin’ along, so-so. Little old Fanny’s holdin’ her own 
—and that’s more’n you’re doin’.” 

Pidge looked into the crib. A core of fetid vapor 
hung above it, and Fanny’s words seemed to blend 
with it. 

“Think you can hold your job and hold a man, too, 
don’t you ? Oh, yes, Redhead knows how. Redhead’s 
got it all worked out. Redhead can tell us all how to 
do it, oh, yes-” 

“What’s the matter, Fanny? Are you scolding, so 
I won’t start? I didn’t come to start something. Just 
came to see you. Wouldn’t you like to go out for an 
hour and have me stay with the—with the--” 

Pidge always halted this way. 

187 








THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“Worried—eh? Worried about somethin’?” Fanny 
piped up. “Well, I’m not tellin’ anything—except 
you ain’t got your little mastiff tied to no corset 
string-” 

“What are you talking about, Fanny?” 

“Like to know. Wouldn’t you?” 

Pidge felt cold. She cared to know what the other 
meant. She didn’t say so, however. She knew a better 
way—an effective way that seemed to come out of 
depths*.within her that knew vast pasts and many lands, 
all strategies of men and maids, all secrets of tent and 
purdah, lattice and veil. 

“Don’t trouble, Fanny. I just came in to see how 
you were getting on. I’m so sorry, you know-” 

“Sorry-” Fanny laughed. 

“So sorry, dear—that you’re penned in this way— 
and Albert missing!” 

“Sorry!” Fanny screamed her mirth. 

“Don’t you want me to be sorry for you, dear?” 
Pidge trailed. “Why, I haven’t been nearly so good as 
I meant to be-” 

“Well, you dam’ little itch-face—talking to me about 
being sorry. Who’n heller-you to tell me about being 
sorry? Who’n heller-you to talk to me about me get- 
tin’ penned in an’ Albert missin’, when you can’t keep 
your own man—when you don’t carry your own babies ? 
Who’n heller-you anyway?” 

Then Fanny got down to business and spoke of 
life in the here and now. 

“Never mind, dear,” said Pidge. “We can’t attend 
188 







RUFUS’ PLAY DAY 


to everything. I’m going out to get you some ice cream. 
I’ll be back in a few minutes.” 

She was in the street. She brought back a paper pail 
without haste. Fanny had begun to cry. 

“Don’t feel badly,” Pidge said, washing a saucer and 
spoon. 

Fanny cried on. Pidge served her a large dish, and 
a smaller one for the older child. Then from the paper, 
she spooned tiny mouthfuls into the face in the crib— 
spooned until there was sleep from the novel coolness 
of the sweet. Then Pidge patted Fanny’s shoulder, as 
she passed out, promising to come back some time to¬ 
morrow. 

Upstairs she found Rufe, shirt open at the throat, 
standing by the back window. The light in the room 
was heavily shaded. He looked to her covertly, half 
expectantly. 

“Want to read something?” he said in a pleasant 
tone. 

“No. I’m going to bed,” said Pidge. 




XXX 


THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE 

E ARLY the next morning in the shadowy back 
room, Pidge moved softly about as she dressed. 
She saw the new golf suit, and her lips twisted 
into a smile. Another toy; another bit of acting. That 
was all of the game he cared for—the clothes that went 
with it. She thought of the night on the corner when 
the newsboy had pointed out Rufe as a movie actor. 
She saw his desk by the window. It looked like a 
troubled face. Here she was, as usual, furiously busy 
with his faults—so occupied that he didn’t have to 
bother at all, sleeping serenely on. But he didn’t under¬ 
stand, never could understand, that her agony was be¬ 
cause she saw them as part of herself; that in her own 
heart she couldn’t free herself from responsibility; 
knowing deeply the dis-e ase that comes from that soul- 
deep question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” 

And there he was lying on his back, innocent as a 
child. The pain darted into her heart . . . the baby 
carriage at Santa Monica. His complexion was almost 
as fresh, his black hair brushed back. It was as if he 
had fallen asleep with a tear in his eyes, for a little 
penciling of salt was on the thin blue-veined skin under 
the eyelid. His breast was uncovered and that spoiled 
190 


THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE 


the picture, spoiled the pathos; for Rufe, though the 
least athletic of men, was hairy and glad of it. 

She hadn’t slept. This, since coming home last night, 
was a show-down time, as she expressed it. She had 
met the same several times with her father, when the 
days became so black and evil that something had to 
happen. Deep, under words and surface thoughts, lay 
the affair of Fanny’s room. The dreary consciousness 
of that never left her, but actual thinking of details was 
another affair. She couldn’t give way to them, and 
keep the outer quiet she had determined upon. She had 
been too honest to hide from herself, even in the be¬ 
ginning, that Rufe habitually took life as it came. She 
never could forget his first appraisal of herself in the 
reception room of The Public Square. 

So this hadn’t come in the nature of shock; rather it 
was a pitiless uncovering of ugliness that had been 
vaguely subconscious before. What hurt her most 
keenly, so that she was close to crying out, as she lay 
beside him in the night, was the inevitable tramp of 
Fate, audible through it all—their meeting in Dicky’s 
room; Dicky’s opening of The Public Square to him in 
the first place; her own bringing of Fanny Gallup to 
this house; the weaving back and forth into one, of the 
different lives—even her father’s. 

Rufe wasn’t at home when she returned that night. 
He hadn’t rung her at the office, but she found word 
with Miss Claes that he had gone down to Washington. 
She felt something was going to happen, but through 
the day she had gathered her strength together to de- 
191 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


cide that she wouldn’t be the one to bring it about. 
Underneath all was the old sense of her responsibility. 

Pidge was half tempted to seek Miss Claes this night. 
She even went so far as to learn that her friend was at 
home. It always happened so, when she needed help: 
Miss Claes might be out any or at all other times. A 
light was in the basement room, and no voices, but 
Pidge crept back upstairs without speaking. . . . She 
had failed. She had run away from her father, failing 
there; failing here. She must see this through alone a 
little longer. . . . The next afternoon Rufe called for 
her at The Public Square. His eyes held a glint of 
triumph. 

“I’m going to France,” he said, when they were in 
the street. “I’ve arranged to do a big feature for 
Redge Walters and a Sunday newspaper syndicate set.” 

“But how about the draft?” 

“Went down to Washington to start things going to 
fix that. Redge gave me letters. Looks as if there 
won’t be much trouble. You see, the Government 
needs the writers—public sentiment, you know.” 

It wasn’t that Pidge didn’t think of things to say on 
this point of making public sentiment, but a great gray 
ennui was over her. She had said enough about his 
faults. 

“You know, I’ve been smothering in Harrow Street 
—had to get away,” he added. 

“Yes, I know, Rufe.” After a time, she said, “I 
think it’s a good thing.” 

“That’s the way to look at it, Pan,” he said in a 
192 




THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE 


relieved voice, and confided: “I need the experience, 
too, you know, because I’ve never been to Europe-” 

It was out before she thought: “But how did you 
get to the Tunisian sands?” 

“I mean I’ve never stayed long enough to look 
around. Of course, Eve passed through.” 

He grouched for the rest of the evening, but she felt 
worse about this than he did. She had thought she was 
through nailing him like that. It had done no good, 
merely an additional breaking out of her abysmal tem¬ 
per. . . . On the night before he left, Rufe was at his 
best—the playboy she loved so much; and, of course, 
she was pressed harder and harder into the realms of 
the Arctic Princess, which was by no means her nat¬ 
ural habitat. At last, he had her crying, which was 
something, because it hadn’t happened often. 

“Going to miss your Rufie,” he whispered, “sorry 
he’s going away?” 

“Oh, it isn’t that!” 

“What is it, Pan?” he demanded in the tone of the 
head of a household. “Get it off your mind—don’t 
keep anything from me.” 

That started her to laughing. “It’s noth-nothing, 
Rufe. I’m all right now,” she said brokenly. “I’m 
only hurt because I haven’t done it better-” 

“What?” 

“Us.” 

“Forget it,” he said. “I never hold a grudge.” 






XXXI 


TWO LETTERS FROM INDIA 

L ATER in July, Miss Claes received letters from 
Dicky Cobden and Nagar. Each, it appeared, 
■ had been mainly interested in writing about the 
other. She read Dicky’s first: 

... I think I’ve seen the Man you wrote of, but I’m 
more interested in our own Nagar—altogether different 
in his native dress. I never knew how civilized clothes 
could slow up a man’s looks. If a white man in New 
York were as good-looking as Nagar is here, the movie 
folk would kidnap him, if necessary, for the screen. 

. . . Things look differently over here. Sitting in this 
plain house of the one they call Mahatma-ji, I seem to 
understand things that would appear absurd in New 
York. . . . Nagar has opened up. He talks freely and 
laughs. He is human, and his American years show in 
fine light. Try to think how startling all this was to one 
coming up from Bombay, expecting the old sphinx of 
your basement and halls. ... I find myself frequently 
at the Ashrama —a houseful of saints—young men 
and women devoted to the Mahatma-ji, like Nagar, 
and who apparently have taken vows covering self- 
sacrifices unlimited. Gandhi is a bit of old brass with 
a mustache; terribly battered, only fifty they say, but 
he shows the wear of greater years. I seemed to feel 
194 


TWO LETTERS FROM INDIA 


that he had been frozen, that he had been whipped, 
that he had been burned. Some of his teeth are gone. 
. . . He tells us that you can’t fight back and expect 
to get anywhere. He says to answer a hurt with a 
hurt is to prepare for hurt again. He says you never 
can understand your enemy by hating him. He says 
that India can only triumph by returning into herself. 
Imagine such unearthly affairs from a barrister edu¬ 
cated in Middle Temple, London! And Nagar appears 
to understand all this. ... I haven’t the organs to 
believe much. My training hasn’t prepared me easily 
to accept miracles—more later, when I cool down. But 
Nagar is great to me in himself. I think I find him 
more interesting, even than Gandhi. Sometimes he 
seems to contain Gandhi. But it would smash every¬ 
thing I have to work with, if I gave either one of them 
my entire belief. Yet I dread the thought of going 
away. . . . 

The letter from Nagar was then read slowly twice, 
and the smile on the face of Miss Claes gradually lost 
itself in a blur of white, as if twilight had crept into 
the basement room. 

. . . The American whom we know never speaks 
directly of the one he loves; it does not seem to occur 
to him that we have sympathy that enfolds his secrets. 
He asks questions—asks questions. He shakes his 
head. His college-trained intellect does not reach up, 
does not hold up its cup to receive the synthesis. It 
moves wearily from one to another of its separate 
analyses, with only rarely a connective flash of intuition. 

T 95 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


But his heart keeps burning, yearning all the time, and 
as he learns, he acts. So he seems very safe. ... I 
have wished so often that he were going to you, instead 
of to his work in Europe, but that, of course, is selfish. 
He has his work there. We must hold him between 
us. He knows already that he will not be able to see 
and feel in France, as he does here. It is his ordeal. 
I have told him many times; every day, in fact, that 
what he sees and feels here, he must remember there, 
and hold to, until it is made working knowledge within 
him. . . . Our work is merely preparing. The Little 
Man, as Richard calls him affectionately from that old 
story, realizes that the hour is not yet. We work in 
the midst of many shades of darkness and obliquity and 
inhibition. We are marking time, marking time. . . . 
Our American will return to India in time to see the 
Day break. I have promised to keep him informed. 
As Paul Richard says, “We must prepare in ourselves 
that magnificent day.” 

Miss Claes sat in silence. Then she seemed to be¬ 
come aware that voices above vaguely distracted. She 
went to the door, and listened. Fanny Gallup was 
crying, with little care who heard. 




XXXII 


FRANCE, 1918. THE YANK 

D ICKY hadn’t had his clothes off for several 
days. He was in the “Oregon” Forest with 
Colonel Boulding who was no sort of man to 
tie to for one who felt that a clean washrag was one of 
the necessities of life. Dicky hadn’t cared for stren¬ 
uous field work but it had come to him in France; not 
the actions of the big fields so much as the extraor¬ 
dinary little back-line dramas that break the laws of 
perspective by rising more clearly, as days drew on. 
Four days before, on his way in to Paris, he had met 
Boulding, who was taking out several fresh battalions 
to relieve a hard-pressed front at St. Aignan. 

“I’ve got an extra horse,” said Boulding, “good old 
Yorick, steady as a tram-car, and we’ll be back in three 
days.” 

Dicky stood in the twilight, half rain, half snow— 
one of the interminable waits for order, Boulding back 
in the ranks somewhere. The firing had died down and 
Dicky dropped his bridle rein to bang his arms about 
to get some blood stirring in them. One of the prob¬ 
lems of life just now was why wet snow soaked through 
leather quicker than straight rain water; another was 
why letters from home always dragged around the 
197 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


wrong fronts before being delivered; another was how 
long was IT going to last; another was hot coffee. 

His mount had turned gently away in the thickening 
dusk, turned on his toe corks through the slush to 
follow a wind-blown leaf. Plop — a water-soaked 
trench-siding gave way, and Yorick disappeared into 
an unused pit. Dicky stared down into the inky dark. 
The beast snorted. A flashlamp was procured from one 
of Boulding’s lieutenants and Dicky found his way 
down into the trench. 

It became clear why Yorick couldn’t rise, even if 
unhurt. The trench bottom was a six-inch paste of 
water and clay. Holding the flashlight in front of 
him, Dicky approached the sprawled beast. Yorick 
looked like a monster in the process of being born out 
of the mud. There was something both humorous 
and hopeless about the gaunt lifted head that came up 
into the ray. And now Dicky discovered that Yorick’s 
left foreleg below the knee veered off suddenly to 
the left, at a decided angle from the way it should lie. 
Dicky felt alone in a harrowing underworld. The leaf 
that had caused it all, or possibly one like it, protruded 
from the snaffle ring. Yorick had come up to his leaf 
all right, and then forgotten what he had gone after. 

“Pretty lucky old boy, you are,” Dicky said. “Work 
done, war over for you, nice warm ditch to lie up in 
at the last, and I’ve got to take all the responsibility.” 

He drew the pistol from his belt and placed it on 
the little twist of hair halfway between the eyes. 

198 




FRANCE, 1918. THE YANK 


“I ought to take the saddle off first, but I’m not going 
to. So long, old kid, and best luck.” 

The pistol banged in the dugout like a cannon 
cracker under a flower pot, and the voice of an Ameri¬ 
can sentry above was heard to say: 

‘‘Some fool’s blowed his head off, down there. Why 
in hell can’t a man be patient!” 

Dicky climbed up on the level ground, no sicker 
than before, but a trifle more tired. . . . He was 
chafed. Yorick had done some of it in the last four 
days, but not all. He was chafed in and out and 
over, chafed from his boots and belt and helmet, but 
especially from his key ring. This last had ground 
into him all day. He took it out now, as he waited 
for coffee. Meanwhile he edged as near as possible 
(without murdering anybody) to the trench stove 
Boulding’s cook had got going. 

There was the key to his mother’s house in Fiftieth 
Street—a thick brass stubby affair that belonged to 
the door of a house where hardware was well under¬ 
stood. This key couldn’t be thrown away. Though 
it was practically unthinkable—a man might some time 
get home. It had been done. There was a key to 
54 Harrow Street. The woman who ran the place 
had told him to keep it with him, because it was a 
symbol of something which he had professed at the 
time to understand. Then there was a long, old- 
fashioned inside door key, black and a little bent—the 
meanest of all to dig into a man’s hip—this to the 
hall door of certain rooms in the same Harrow Street 
199 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


house. Its duplicate was in the hands of a girl he used 
to know. She had said she would look in on the apart¬ 
ment while he was gone, but she was married now. 
No use keeping it any longer. 

He took it off the ring, but put it back again. 

Certain things were good, but hard to get. Brandy 
was good. Coffee was good, especially hot. Saddle- 
horse stew was good. Porkpie, pork and beans, pork 
sausage and pancakes were reasonable and of good 
report, but keys on key rings that gored a man while 
he rode or slept, and stretched back into meanings of 
the Utterly Absurd that a man couldn’t get straight 
in Paris, much less in this slaughterhouse of the West¬ 
ern Front—keys on key rings were sheer perversities, 
especially when a man wasn’t game to toss them into 
any one of these open sewers. .... 

They were saying at home that his stuff was blurred 
and unconvincing. Even John Higgins had been singu¬ 
larly silent of late. Chris Heidt, the managing editor 
of his newspaper connection, had recently written: 
“We miss that fine patriotic ring that we have come 
to expect from our correspondent. Your stuff shows 
subtleties and innuendoes and the dissatisfaction of the 
boys—the little things back of the lines that make for 
disorganization, rather than the big doings at the 
front.” 

It was dawning on Dicky that there were two kinds 
of American patriots, soldier and civilian; and that for 
keenness and fire-eating zest, the man in the zone of 
advance was not to be compared to the paper-fed folk 
200 




FRANCE, 1918. THE YANK 


at home. In fact, there were only two ways for a 
writer to please the firesides of America, as the hot 
flames of Hun-hatred and world-correcting benefactions 
went up the chimney. One was to stay at home and 
write the war as you supposed it to be, and the other 
was to remember how you felt, how the war seemed to 
you, before you reached France, and write it from that 
angle. 

Blurred, all right, and chafed. One thing he was 
getting to understand a little, and to have an affection 
for. That was the American soldier—not officer, so 
much, but the ruffian in the ranks, dogus bogus Ameri- 
canus —the fellow fused of Irish, Scotch and Jew, of 
German, English, Russian and French; something of 
each in the solution, something of all. In the first 
place, this Yank was the funniest thing ever turned 
loose on the planet. His officers were occasionally funny 
in a different way. 

Dicky vaguely perceived that an abyss was slowly 
but surely forming between this Yank and the patriots 
at home—an abyss only to be bridged by silence. Quite 
as slowly but surely Dicky’s heart opened to this en¬ 
listed man. One has to love something. Once or 
twice, things he saw this laughing maniac from Amer¬ 
ica do made him very much ashamed of his own mental 
antics in a certain red room of Bombay. 




XXXIII 


PARIS, 1918—HADDON AND AMES 

S O far as Dicky was concerned, the things of great 
moment in his experience in France all happened 
in the fall of 1918. He was in Paris at the end of 
that shocking summer, and found a letter from Nagar 
which reiterated that the curtain could not rise on the 
Drama of India until Great Britain was through fight¬ 
ing in France and the land of the Euphrates. . . . He 
was stopping at the Garonne . There was a knock at 
his room door one afternoon and voices outside. It 
was Haddon and Ames, correspondents out of New 
York, and they wanted money. Haddon talked first: 

“ . . . He’s off his head and in a mess. He men¬ 
tioned your name. He says he sniffed some gas out 
in the vineyards somewhere in April, and can’t get over 
it. Either that, or the family he’s fouled up with is 
feeding him ground glass.” 

“Who’s this you’re talking about?” Cobden asked, 
though he had heard the name. 

“Melton — done some magazine stories,” said 
Haddon. 

“You say he mentioned my name?” 

“His French father-in-law picked on me first,” Ames 
put in. “Just happened. I’m at the Charente, where a 
lot of Americans are putting up. Told me a long story 
202 


PARIS, 1918—HADDON AND AMES 


of wrongs to his only child—a female child now mar¬ 
ried to Author Melton. Mentioned your name-” 

“He was gassed ?” Dicky repeated. 

“He says he was,” said Haddon. “It’s an operation 
case, all right. Melton will have to be cut out of that 
French house.” 

“I don’t know whether it’s gas in my case or not,” 
Dicky said, “but the fact is I am not rightly aboard this 
conversation.” 

“The idea is to get aboard with some American cur¬ 
rency,” said Ames. “American in trouble—fellows all 
willing to help a little. Up to somebody to get the fool 
out. Father picked on me-” 

“Let me get this straight,” Dicky heard himself say¬ 
ing, though all he wanted under heaven at this moment 
was to be alone. 

Ames was one of the best Washington correspondents 
in the American press, a fact getter extraordinary, who 
had a semi-inspired way now and then of putting down 
his stuff. He was fifty, a friend of John Higgins and 
weathered to a fuzzy gray like a fence board. Just now 
he bluffed out his embarrassment by speaking of one 
of Melton’s stories which Dicky was professionally 
familiar with: 

“A short story in one of the weeklies—called Dr. 
Filter —hell of a good story. . . . It’s nothing to me,” 
Ames finished. “Only the kid’s an American, and he’s 
tight up against one of Paris’ prettiest ways.” 

Haddon took up the tale: 

“The Frenchman’s name is Ducier. Melton’s been 
203 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


living at his house—mixed with the daughter—forced 
to marry. Now Parent Ducier says the least he can 
do is to get a living for himself out of it—hard times.” 

“Actually married?” Dicky asked. 

“Showed me the passport,” said Ames. “I couldn’t 
get a word alone with Melton. He can’t leave his bed. 
One of the'family always in the room.” 

Dicky was straining so hard that he resisted easy 
comprehension. It was an intense moment. There 
was more talk. 

“Of course, whatever you want from me-” Dicky 

broke in. 

“What you can spare,” Haddon said. “The parents 
ask twenty thousand francs, but they’ll take half that 
easy. Just now the boy’s too sick to escape.” 

“Count on me for at least half of whatever it costs,” 
Dicky said. 

Haddon’s eyes widened. Ames looked astonished. 

“I’ve heard Cobden is rich, Ames,” Haddon ex¬ 
plained. 

The gray one came closer and examined Dicky’s 
face. “I heard it, too,” he said. “You really mean 
this?” 

“I would give you the amount now, but I under¬ 
stand that you aren’t sure what it will be. I know 
Melton. I’m glad to help, of course.” 

“I’ve heard you were rich, too,” Ames repeated 
slowly. “But I didn’t believe it.” 

“Why not?” 

“You’re too good a newspaper man,” said Ames. 

204 




PARIS, 1918—HADDON AND AMES 


“I didn’t think a man could have real money and be 
as good a newspaper man as you.” 

Dicky hardly heard the tribute. The two men were 
leaving. That was the important thing. . . . He was 
alone. An intermittent geyser was at work within him. 
Every few minutes a surge of hot hope boiled up in his 
breast. It threatened to deluge him. Out of all the 
year’s work was netted at this time one bit of working 
knowledge, as Nagar might have called it, that he must 
not be deluded by this hope! He tried to cork it up; 
failing in that he stood as still as he could in the midst 
of the surges. Gradually, he got the thing in hand, but 
it was bitter work, this refusing to take the first real 
breath of life he had known for years. 

He found himself in twilight. The day had slipped 
off, while he struggled alone. His forehead was 
clammy with the effort going on. To go back into 
that dreary hopelessness, and not be able to think out 
the reason why! The force that he had to work with 
now came from the painful mistake he had made in 
working for reward before; from the shock of that 
realization in the red room, that underneath every¬ 
thing, he had counted on his virtue being crowned with 
Pidge somehow coming across. 

Now the fight changed. Persistently in the depths 
of him grew an awareness that he had not done the 
full task called of him merely in offering Ames money. 
This point became so ugly and evident—that he had to 
laugh. More and more, as moments sped on, it faced 
205 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


him squarely. He had no sentimentalism to tide him 
over; his emotions stayed ice cold. 

“But it’s like a fool Sunday-school story!” he 
muttered. 

Then again the words broke from him: “But living 
God, suppose she doesn’t want the bundle back! Sup¬ 
pose she’s been trying to lose it, and here I am running 
after her, saying, ‘You’ve dropped something, Ma¬ 
dame-’ ” 

But he couldn’t budge. 

Full dark was fn the room when he rung Ames at 
the Charente: 

“I’ve been thinking over this thing, Mr. Ames, and 
I’m asking a favor-” 

“Yes,” came coldly across the town. Ames believed 
he was trying to wriggle out of his promise to pay 
half. 

“I’ve come to the conclusion that this thing is up 
to me—the whole business, and I’ll thank you very 
much for Mr. Melton’s present address.” 

“No. 16, Rue de Belville, Villancourt.” The tones 
had warmed. 

“Thanks. I’ll report to you presently,” Cobden said. 

“Sure you don’t want me—or one of us to go along 
with you?” Ames persisted. 

“I’ll see what I can do alone first, if you don’t 
mind.” 






XXXIV 


THE HOUSE OF DUCIER 

Q UEER drama, from eight to twelve that night 
in the little house of Ducier. Four hours—as 
long as an uncut opera! The sick man 
moaned, and interrupted everything, calling to Dicky 
Cobden: 

“For the love of God, don’t go ’way and leave me 
here! I’m done for, if you leave me alone again. . . . 

Oh, Cobden, Cobden-” 

The daughter wept. It was her entire part. She 
had a brown mole upon her ruddy rounded cheek, and 
very white small teeth in gums of a red that Dicky 
had never seen before except in dental advertisements. 
She was made of little curves, and all of them were 
required in the art of her weeping. 

“What’s the matter?” Dicky asked her, during a halt 
in the proceedings. 

“You are taking him away!” 

“I don’t seem to be very successful about it.” 

“Oh, but you will—you are taking him away!” 
Dicky was glad to hear that he was going to get 
what he came for, but the obstacles still looked serious. 
“Isn’t that what you want—to be rid and paid ?” 

“My father—yes—but me—no, no! He is my lover 
—oh, such an adored!” 


207 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


It was new to Cobden’s experience just how ob¬ 
durate an outraged European can be. M. Ducier 
reiterated grimly that weeks ago in this house, he had 
suddenly discovered a condition which destroyed all 
his past and future. He had forced marriage, but that 
did not suffice. Dicky turned to the bed at this point. 

“How did you happen to stand for marriage, 
Melton ?” 

“Nothing to do with it—I was gassed!” 

Here the daughter’s cries arose, the hands of the 
mother were uplifted to heaven, and the face of the 
father became more grim. It was against Dicky’s 
training and heredity to stand for being bilked, yet 
he hesitated to call for help. To start the police at 
work would mean the American Legation before he 
was finished, and incredible delay. Momentarily Melton 
made it harder. 

“If you go away and leave me after all they have 
said,” he moaned, “there won’t be any need for you to 
come back! I am telling you, Cobden, they keep me 
here—just as if my legs were tied.” 

Rufe spoke in English, which the mother and father 
did not understand, but of which the daughter had 
plenty to catch the drift. Dicky did not miss the fact 
that in the midst of her weeping there were subtle 
affairs to confide to her father. ... It cost him 
eighteen hundred dollars to get Melton clear that night; 
but, at least, Melton was thoroughly clear, the marriage 
certificate and receipt for heartbalm in full, in his 
pocket. He watched curiously now to see if the tears 
208 




THE HOUSE OF DUCIER 


of Daughter Ducier were dried—but no, though Melton 
spurned her last proffer of a kiss—at least with her, 
money was not all. 

In the days that followed, Dicky wasn’t able to get 
any rest from a sense that he had done well. With 
every ounce of his returning strength Rufe Melton 
yearned to get out of Paris. He had been abused; he 
was frightened to depths hitherto unplumbed. He 
lived in a mortal dread day and night that the Duciers 
would come for him again. 

“I can’t get a passage for you at a moment’s notice,” 
Dicky would say. “Besides, you’re not fit to travel for 
a few days yet. I don’t want to send you back to New 
York looking like a hounded Apache. Let me do this 
thing right, Melton, while I’m in on it.” 

“But don’t go away and leave me here!” Rufe 
moaned. “Let me go out with you when you go.” 

“You needn’t have the slightest fear from the 
Duciers.” 

The hands came up and waved hopelessly. 

“You don’t know them! You don’t know her!” 
Rufe moaned. “I want to get out of here. I want to 
get on the ship. I don’t want to be left alone.” 

And this was what he was getting ready to send back 
to Pidge! Once, when Dicky was really hard driven, 
a sudden chill of rage came over him and he proceeded 
this far with a sentence: 

“Why, Melton, I really ought to put you-” 

The other words—“to death,” he somehow managed 
to keep from speech. Dicky suffered especially from the 
209 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


feeling that he was playing the boob. To be sincerely 
in wrong was his pet aversion—dating from the night 
of the Punjabi dinner. Besides, he was tortured with 
the thought that Pidge Musser wouldn’t thank him. 
Surely, for her sake, his mind repeated, it would have 
been better even to put old Ames straight, and let one 
American meet Paris unaided. But Rufe had called 
for him in his trouble, had mentioned the name of 
Cobden to the others. 

One of the strangest things to Dicky now was that 
Pidge’s husband could accept all this—somehow as if 
it were his due. Like a family affair. Rufe seldom 
spoke of Pidge. Apparently getting back to New 
York meant her; apparently they weren’t separated. 
Rufe had the most extraordinary sense of taking her 
for granted. If he had any money or resources in 
Paris, he didn’t let the fact be known. It was Dicky 
who purchased his passage for New York. Again 
Dicky’s capacity for astonishment was stretched, be¬ 
cause Rufe seemed able to comfort himself with the 
fact that he had it all coming. He had never been 
sick before. His present infirmity was entirely en¬ 
grossing. “I was gassed,” covered all discrepancies 
of word and deed. 

Back in his room, after packing Rufe aboard the 
steamer, Dicky found himself nervous, tired and irri¬ 
table. A servant came and took out the extra bed Rufe 
had occupied. The place was stiller than ever, after 
that—no moaning, no fears, no complaints; but it 
wasn’t all relief as Dicky had fancied it would be. He 
210 



THE HOUSE OF DUCIER 


missed something—the world was so crazy anyway— 
something that had taken him out of himself for two 
weeks; something at least, that had played upon a 
different set of faculties. Suddenly it dawned upon 
him, though he couldn’t tell why, that Pidge would be 
glad after all. If you play orderly and guardian and 
benefactor to a child—of course you miss the wretch. 
And Pidge was a woman, and she had said—what had 
she said, about there not being two ways? Now Dicky 
felt better. There had not been two ways for him. 
The chapter was ended at any rate. . . . 

Another event of this fall of 1918, so far as Dicky 
Cobden was concerned, was the Armistice. You can 
tell how inactive hope had become within him at this 
time, and within the breasts of tens of thousands of 
others, when he hadn’t believed that any other than a 
state of war could exist. 

And finally, in December, six weeks after the Armis¬ 
tice, at the time of the greatest rush in history for 
trans-Atlantic steamers, when Dicky had about con¬ 
cluded that the quickest way home to New York would 
be around by Asia, a sepoy on leave crossed the city of 
Paris from the cantonments in Lourdenvoie, and asked 
to see the American at the Garonne. 

“You are Richard Cobden?” the young Hindu said, 
when the room door was closed. 

Dicky nodded, a certain gladness in him that he did 
not understand. At the same time he was intent in a 
scrutiny of the caller’s face—a youth, but very worn. 

211 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


Something about the eyes made the American think 
of a camel. 

“You have been to Ahmedabad, Mr. Cobden?” 

“Yes.” 

“Might I ask the name of the river there?” 

“The Sabarmati.” 

“Are you expecting a message from an American 
in Ahmedabad?” 

“No.” 

“From any one there?” 

“Yes.” Now Dicky knew that it was the patience 
in the young Hindu’s eyes that made him think of a 
camel. 

“Is the name Juna?” 

“N^garjuna.” 

The soldier bowed. “It is well. I was told to be 
assured, before giving you the message. It is this: 
That the curtain has risen, the play begun, and that a 
seat is reserved for you ” 

“Is there need of haste?” 

“No haste, but no delay!” 

“My plan now is to go to New York-” 

“That need not be changed, since it was added for 
me to say—that it will be well for you to travel west¬ 
ward rather than to the East.” 

“To Ahmedabad at once?” 

“You will do well to go first to Bombay.” 

“Thank you. Is there anything I can do for you?” 

“Only say to Nagarjuna—that I, too, hope to come 
for the end of that play.” 


212 




THE HOUSE OF DUCIER 


“Your name?” 

“He knows his messenger. Here I am not a name, 

hardly a number-” 

“A cigarette—a drink?” 

“I will not tarry since it is far to the cantonments.” 
The sepoy bowed and departed. 




XXXV 

FANNY HEARS THE DRUM 


P IDGE MUSSER had moved around in an 
indescribable “deadness” for several days fol¬ 
lowing Rufe’s departure, before it landed on 
her, theme and all, that she could do a book. Almost 
four years had elapsed since she wrote the Lance. One 
Sunday morning after the new work was begun, Pidge 
took out the old story from the drawer under the wavy 
glass, and glanced over the pages, a puckered smile on 
her lips. Then she took the manuscript down to the 
kitchen range, and there was a hot fire for a while. 

The new writing was not so simple and flowing. In 
the first place, there were only Sundays and an hour 
or two in the evening; but more than that was the 
fact that she had learned so well what stories long 
and short are not! She was now in the toil of technic, 
which is a long passage. First the freedom of igno¬ 
rance—“A man’s a fool before he learns technic,” John 
Higgins had said. “He’s a cripple while he’s learning 
it. When he’s learned it, and forgotten he’s learned 
it—he begins to be a workman. That’s the freedom 
of knowledge.” 

The old editor didn’t know he had “said it all” for 
Pidge Musser that day as he looked up from Rufe 
Melton’s story. She wouldn’t forget. Edit and rewrite 
214 


FANNY HEARS THE DRUM 


—some evenings with nothing but a torturing inhibition 
to go to bed with. There was no other way. She was 
tough and broad shouldered. She could toil. She had 
an instinctive awareness also, that the deadliest danger 
in the whole scheme of things for her, at least, was to 
brood inactively. Piled up energy to Pidge meant 
inevitable disruption. 

The Public Square was staying alive under the 
energy amassed by the family of trowel makers, but 
John Higgins wasn’t standing the punishment of the 
days. Pidge saw him falling into the fear of small 
things. Among other institutions he hated was the 
U. S. Department of Justice, but this department was 
hot after him and he was bluffed at last. The climax 
had come upon the arrest of a famous pacifist, when 
John Higgins was cornered with the necessity of 
silence. Since there was no outlet in protest, his venom 
turned in on himself. His periods of “illness” were 
frequent, and Pidge had a great deal to do. His old 
reaction against her marriage was apparently forgotten, 
though his temper was unreliable. He was using her 
now as never before. Once in a while, he would look 
at her long and queerly, and often he said, “I wish 
Dicky were here.” 

In April, 1918, about the same time, a book and 
a boy were born in 54 Harrow Street. Pidge was 
present at both deliveries. The enactment of the boy’s 
coming required a full night; and during the next day, 
her activities at The Public Square were remote to 

215 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


Pidge, who had shrunk so deeply into herself from 
nausea and a new kind of fright, that the meaning of 
outer events was distorted and ungrippable. John 
Higgins didn’t miss the fact. In the drag of the after¬ 
noon, she was called to the telephone—Miss Claes on 
the wire: 

“You’d better come, Pidge!” 

An hour later, between five and six in the afternoon, 
she was in the Harrow Street house, looking down 
into Fanny’s face which squirmed from side to side. 
The eyes moved around the room and finally fixed on 
Pidge. 

“That you, Redhead?” 

“Yes-” 

“You was a hell of a long time cornin’.” 

“I know-” 

“That dirty animal hurt me-” Evidently this 

referred to the doctor. 

“I’m sorry. He didn’t mean to——” 

“Know all about it, don’t yer? Know all about 
everythin’, don’t yer?” 

Pidge didn’t answer. 

Fanny lay a moment in pallid anger. Then her eyes 
slowly opened wider, stretched, filled with astonish¬ 
ment, part rapture, part fear. 

“Why, Musser,” Fanny said in an awed tone, as 
one listening to a far sound, “Holy Christ, I’m dying!” 

She was the last one in the room to know it—except 
the baby. 

A queer little dud with his black hair that stayed 
216 







FANNY HEARS THE DRUM 


combed. No telling what he knew any of the time. 
He didn’t open his eyes so that anybody could catch 
him at it for several days, but the nurse never would 
have done raving over his black lashes. Finally Pidge 
heard the news—that the eyes weren’t black after all, 
as the hair and lashes would indicate, but a dense blue. 

“He’s going to be a soldier—such a soldier!” the 
nurse exclaimed. “I know I’ll die when I have to 
leave him.” 

Pidge’s lips worked without sound, and then a funny 
little twisted smile stayed there—that made Miss Claes 
love her as never before. 




XXXVI 


RUFE HURRIES HOME 


R UFE MELTON came home to find life not 
the same. Matters had evolved while he was 
“* away about his country’s business, matters 
that didn’t please him now. He had rushed to Pidge. 
As the steamer approached New York, a novel and 
unforeseen eagerness awoke within to get to her, but 
she hadn’t put off her Arctics. Besides, off duty from 
her editorial job, there was an infant in her arms for 
the most part—a seven-months-old male infant with 
combed hair, that had looked into his face and begun 
to yell. Rufe took this as a personal affront. He had 
supposed it hers at first. 

“Sometimes, I forget that it isn’t,” she had said. 
Harrow Street furnished the statement and proof, 
however, that it was Fanny Gallup’s, who was dead. 
“But why don’t you adopt the other two?” he asked. 
“Miss Claes has found homes for Albert’s children,” 
Pidge said. 

Rufe stood it for two days. “This can’t go on, Pan. 
I’ve got to get to work—no nerves to work in this 

racket, since I was gassed-” 

“Of course not.” 

Under his surface anger, she saw the old look of 
hurt wonder that harrowed her so. 

“Come back—any time, Rufe—come whenever you 
can. Always a place here, you know.” 

218 


XXXVII 

JOHN HIGGINS’ CODE 


W HEN Dicky Cobden reached New York, he 
found that Pidge had been called to Los 
Angeles, because her father was ill. It was 
an evening in mid-January, 1919, and he went at once 
to his mother’s house in Fiftieth Street. The strain 
of waiting for his home-coming had been almost too 
much there. Grandfather had flickered out; his bed 
and chairs gaped and would not be comforted. Dicky 
went into the living arms, however, and found rest 
and gave it. His mother and aunt and sister livened 
up like plants, newly-watered. He was queerly aston¬ 
ished to learn that Pidge recently had called upon his 
people—“just a social call,” his mother said. 

Outwardly things looked as hopeless as possible at 
The Public Square. From his latest retirement to 
his rooms for a change of luck, John Higgins had been 
taken to the hospital, instead of returning to his desk. 
It was a gray-faced old man that Dicky found in the 
early morning of his first full day at home, in a room 
that smelled of drugs. The face didn’t look at him 
squarely. The light hurt John Higgins’ eyes and made 
the features writhe. Dicky wanted to move around to 
the other side of the bed, so the face would be shaded, 
but his old friend was gripping him with both hands. 
219 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“We have been looking for you a long time, Dicky,” 
he kept saying. 

It wasn’t the unshaven white stubble that changed the 
face so much as the quiver of the upper lip, when John 
Higgins spoke. 

“What’s the matter, John?” 

‘‘Indigestion—all kinds of indigestion. Damn ’em, 
Dicky, they’ve made me eat my own words-” 

“Who?” 

“The most pestiferous public nuisance ever organ¬ 
ized—Department of Justice.” 

Dicky did not need to be warned against the bete 
noir. Its shadow was upon John Higgins’ face. 

“I rather liked yesterday’s issue,” he said, “and they 
tell me that the next two numbers are practically 
made up.” 

“You’ve been to the office then?” 

“No. I called up from home at breakfast. That’s 
how I heard you were here. Just off ship last 
night-” 

“Bert Ames got in three weeks ago. You were a 
long time coming-” 

“My turn didn’t come—everybody dying to get home 
since the racket stopped.” 

“Your paper’s alive, Dicky—that’s the best that can 
be said.” 

“My paper-” 

“I’m looking for you to buy the rest. My equity 
is on the market. The Public Square is alive, but it’s 
not my fault.” 


220 




JOHN HIGGINS’ CODE 


“Whose?” 

“Didn’t they tell you that ‘The Weekly’ was away?” 

Dicky looked bewildered. A glint of the old humor 
had come back to John Higgins’ eyes, as he added: 

“The woman thou gavest me.” 

“You mean about Pidge Musser being called to Los 
Angeles ?” 

“Suddenly discovered she had a father who couldn’t 
be denied. Ripped out of here on the fifth and left a 
hole in every department. . . . They say I’m done with 
the desk for a time. I knew it without them telling 
me. I’d have had to wire her to-day or to-morrow to 
come back, if you hadn’t turned up.” 

Dicky’s thoughts now became busy adjusting to the 
fact that John Higgins wasn’t returning to the desk 
at once. 

“I know when I’m done,” the old man repeated. 
“It’s taken nearly sixty years, but I know. You’ve 
heard about the serpent that stings itself to death in 
captivity?” 

“It’s just the chafing of the muzzle, John. You’re 
not stinging yourself to death-” 

“We all have our little code, Dicky, and I haven’t 
been true to mine. Your paper’s alive, in spite of what 
I would have done. My code pulled me the other way 
—against you—but that little thing stood by your 
interests. You’ve-got her to thank, not me.” 

“Tell me-” 

“They were doing things in this country that I 

knew about-” the old man shut his eyes, as if in 

221 






THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


nausea—“but she kept me still. Then they arrested 
an old friend of mine—man I’ve known for thirty 
years—man who loves his country all the time —as I do 
not—and they arrested him. One Sunday morning I 
wrote my little say about it all, and as I wrote, I heard 
them singing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ in a church 
down the block from my rooms. That’s what I called 
the article. I was sober. I wrote for all days, and every 
year I had lived went into it—all I was. I was willing 
to throw you—a little matter of money which you 
could afford. I was throwing myself, but I was pleased 
enough with the story to show it to her Monday morn¬ 
ing, instead of sending it down to the composing 
room.” 

The narrative halted for several seconds. Dicky 
moved around the bed to rest the old man’s eyes. 

“That little tumult had me bluffed from the begin¬ 
ning. She barred the way to the printer, that’s all. 
I thought she was done for when she married Melton, 
but she came back stronger than ever. . . . Barred 
the way, Dicky—put her arms across the door. ‘You 
can’t do it, John Higgins, you can’t send that down. 
It’s just wanton destruction. It won’t do what you 
hope. It won’t help your friend, but make life harder 
for him and for all the C. O.’s. This isn’t your prop¬ 
erty to waste. My heart’s in it and Dicky’s money’s in 

it-’ Well, she had her way—and the thing turned 

in on me—my own words. My organs of assimilation 
weren’t strong enough to get away with it.” 

Dicky gripped John Higgins’ shoulder. The old man 
222 





JOHN HIGGINS’ CODE 


added impressively, “Dicky, I've sat at the desk for 
hours and studied how I could ever tell you this one 
truth! I haven’t written a decent line since that article! 
My old side-wheeler doesn’t work—that’s the size 
of it.” 

He was pressing his hand to the top of his head, 
as he went on: 

“I’ve studied how I could tell you. It doesn’t seem 
quite so hard this morning at the show-down—but she’s 
written all the decent stuff that’s supposed to come 
from the Desk. ... I mean what I said. I’m for sale. 
I’ve put it to you straight—the worst. But the paper’s 
alive and the books are for you to look at. Times are 
getting freer. The next two issues will get out them¬ 
selves. It’s all I’ve got-” 

“But you can take a leave of absence, and keep your 
income-” 

“No. That would be a drain. That’s morals pos¬ 
sibly, but not business. I want to sell, Dicky, and what 
I ask won’t break you. I thought for a while I was 
done for, and I made out my part to her. That would 
be simple—but the old hulk still floats—so I have to 
have some money.” 

Now Dicky dwelt reverently upon the old man’s 
secret. Only one thing could have prevented John 
Higgins from getting his masterpiece into print; also 
John Higgins had made out his single possession in 
the world to Pidge—when he thought he was done for. 
This thought now electrified Richard Cobden. He 
wanted events to turn out this way with such one- 
223 






THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


pointed fury that he forgot for an instant that it entailed 
the death of his friend. But some time Pidge must have 
this gift—some way—John Higgins’ life work! Dicky 
arose. The fact that he could do nothing right now 
required extraordinary self-control. 

‘Til look the whole property over to-day and tell 
you to-morrow morning, John. Be sure it will be all 
right for you. We’re-” 

Dicky didn’t know what he had started to say. The 
old man beckoned him back. 

“ . . . Bert Ames can help you for a few days until 
she comes back. No better Washington man, anywhere, 
but Bert knows the desk work, too. . . . Wait. I’ve 
got to tell you before you go how he dropped in to see 
me, day or two after he came back from France. I 
asked him if he’d seen you. He rather allowed he had 
—and launched into the story of your saving young 
Melton from the clutches of the French family. 
Couldn’t stop him in time. He hadn’t the slightest 
notion that the woman at the desk yonder was Mrs. 
Melton.” 

Dicky was pale. 

“It didn’t knock her out. That’s the queer part,” 
John Higgins added. “ . . . Get Bert Ames. There’s 
one man who isn’t doing any damage to you as he loafs 
around New York.” 

“I’ll be back to-morrow morning,” Dicky said. 
“Where’s Melton now—Los Angeles?” 

“No, here in New York. I’ve heard he’s stopping 
at the Vici Club.” 





XXXVIII 

AN OFFICE OF THE WORLD 


D ICKY was in the street and it was still only- 
ten in the morning. The first thing he did 
then was to telegraph Pidge of his arrival; 
that all was well, and for her not to hurry. He spent 
the day at The Public Square offices studying the books, 
reading up in the files. He fancied that he found an 
aggressive sort of integrity here and there through 
the systems, that was familiar. The publishing prop¬ 
erty had weathered the war; it was a building base. 
Dicky found much that he liked, but fought enthusiasm 
—fought back a rush of possessive impulses, until he 
was tired. 

At six, when he reached Harrow Street, for the 
first time, he was not permitted to use the key to the 
street door that he had carried so long, for Miss Claes 
met him at the basement entrance. He had heard her 
voice over the telephone in the morning, but had not 
remotely anticipated the stir of feeling that the sight 
of her awakened. No emotionless reporter about Mr. 
Cobden at this moment. He followed her to the open 
fire; the door was shut. They stood together in 
silence, and he had never seen her look so well. 

“Why, Miss Claes, you are just the same!” he was 
saying. “I mean, all day I have been seeing the rav- 
225 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


ages of the war years in the people at home, in John 
Higgins, in everybody. But you-” 

“Your coming makes me happy.” 

Firelight and a fragrant room, and the stillness of 
Harrow Street. Miss Claes was speaking of Nagar 
—of Pidge-—of Pidge and the child—of Rufus Melton 
—of Fanny Gallup—of himself—as if they were all 
one, all blent in destiny. . . . Pidge had taken the 
child to Los Angeles. 

A ring at the street door! Dicky watched Miss 
Claes’ face as she left the room, purse in hand. She 
returned in a moment with a telegram for him. 

Welcome home. So glad to hear, so relieved. 
Needed here a little longer. Pidge. 

The door shut again. . . . Miss Claes had heard of 
everything—even of his experience with Rufe Melton 
in Paris, and from Pidge what Ames had told John 
Higgins. 

“I should have put Ames wise about that,” Dicky told 
her. “It was pretty hard to have Pidge hurt that way.” 

“She brought home the news exultingly,” Miss Claes 
said. “Hurt, of course—her old sorrow for Rufus 
Melton, but a compensating gladness, too. You would 
have to be a woman, to feel exactly what it meant to 
her. Pidge learned that day that you were close enough 
in sympathy to share her work. That was light to her 
out of the depths.” 

Dicky studied the shadowy face. 

226 





AN OFFICE OF THE WORLD 


“Pidge accepts no revelations from the sacred writ¬ 
ings,” Miss Claes added. “Only messages of action 
count with her. Your action in Paris freshened up her 
life—that you had been brave enough to help her with 
her task. And how richly Pidge will pay!” 

“It wasn’t hard to do, but hard to know that it was 
the thing to do.” 

“All that matters now is that it is done. One crosses 
a goal, or one does not. The rest is forgotten.” 

He told her of John Higgins and The Public Square; 
of his talk in the morning and the day with the files. 
She inquired regarding details, mechanical and com¬ 
mercial—her same old rational grasp upon materials. 
Of course, he did not speak of John Higgins’ secret, 
nor of his own possible purchase. It was a matter of 
mercantile tradition in the Cobden house not to discuss 
an incompleted transaction; but he told her of Pidge’s 
part at the time of the arrest of the editor’s old friend. 

“John Higgins calls her ‘The Weekly,’ ” he added. 
“He says it was Pidge who kept the paper going.” 

Miss Claes turned to the fire to smile. Dicky didn’t 
notice. He was lost in the problem of how John Hig¬ 
gins could give half interest to Pidge, and sell it to 
himself at the same time. . . . They were speaking 
of India. 

“Of course, I’ve arranged to go,” he said. “Nagar 
promises the story of the age— : —” 

“Nagar sent his message here for you, in case you 
did not receive word from the sepoy in Paris—‘No 
haste, but no delay.’ ” 

227 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


He started. This house of Harrow Street seemed 
like an office of all the world to him to-night. 

“ . . . The hardest part is with my people—for me 
to go away again,” he was saying, a little later at the 
door. “Of course, they can’t understand—my mother 
and aunt and sister. Everything looks all right, except 
that—leaving them so soon again.” 

“Perhaps I can help a little. I’ll go to them often— 
while you are away.” 

“That’s quite too good for me to think of,” he said, 
and told her of Pidge’s call. “Why, Miss Claes, I 
haven’t known what it meant to be rested and straight¬ 
ened out like this—since Ahmedabad,” he said at last. 

Her hand was raised before him : 

“Don’t think about it. Don’t analyze. Just—go to 
them—and come back when you can. This also is 
your home always.” 




XXXIX 

SEVEN FLAWLESS DAYS 


D ICKY was riding westward through the citrus 
groves of the last fifty miles into Los Angeles. 
Eight days in New York; there had been no 
public announcement of a change in ownership of The 
Public Square, although John Higgins had retired and 
new energies were actively in operation. The old 
editor’s faith was gone in himself, but anchored all 
the tighter to the son of the trowel makers. 

The great Range was crossed. All the forenoon the 
air had been clear and cold, but at noon the Limited 
had slipped down into San Bernardino, into summer and 
fruit fragrance. Now it was two in the afternoon 
and Dicky looked out upon one little town after another, 
the like of which he had never seen before. Sun¬ 
drenched and flowery towns; breathing-spaces between 
the houses and vine-clad trellises; and everywhere the 
great orchards, sometimes palm-bordered and often 
with rose-covered fences of stone. 

“Sit tight, sit tight,” he said to himself. 

A hundred times he had repeated this to-day. There 
was loose in him a power of feeling which made the 
days of his straight unemotional reporting look like 
a feeble affectation. Coming into the harbor of New 
York less than two weeks before, he had learned to 
229 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


accept the emptiness of life. But since then, curiously 
enough, a new order of content had filled him. Was 
it necessary to be emptied of the old entirely in order 
to be filled with the new? 

Pasadena was behind; the Limited was running down 
grade into Los Angeles; then momentary halts with 
Mexican faces turned to the car windows—Chinese 
faces, a tangle of freights—finally a slow down, and 
on one side, groups of up-turned faces, expectant, some 
strained to an intense kind of pain to catch the eyes of 
their own. . . . The bags had to be put out. There 
were people in front of him; he was shut off from 
windows. 

“Sit tight, Dicky-” 

A white limp-brimmed straw hat pulled down over 
her ears like a bonnet! A taller Pidge—no, she was 
standing on her toes to look over the shoulders of the 
crowd. Now she saw him; her eyes blinked, her 
shoulders lifting quickly. He moved slowly, positively 
not crushing anybody. Her hands were raised—one 
higher than the other, the fingers apart. They stayed 
so, until he pressed against them. She was taller. 
Their faces were so close—both shaded for an instant 
under the wide brim of her hat. He had been looking 
into her eyes; then they were too close to look into. 
It seemed neither had anything to do about it. He 
hardly dared remember. 

Some one near by knew a happiness that shrieked. 
They walked away from the many voices. Then he 
realized that he was carrying his two hand bags. 

230 




SEVEN FLAWLESS DAYS 


“Where’s the parcel room?” he asked. 

“I’ll show you the way. The station is very old and 
dingy.” 

He checked them. They walked to the other end of 
the yards where the big palms called. 

“How’s your father?” 

“I think—he’s better. You heard about the baby 
—Fanny Gallup’s baby?” 

“Yes.” 

“I brought him west with me. He’s in Santa Monica 
now, so I’ll have to hurry back. You’ll come?” 

“To Santa Monica?” 

“Yes.” 

“Shall we get a motor car?” 

“No. The interurban. I’ll show you.” 

“Is there a place to stop down there?” 

“Oh, yes, I’ll show you.” 

“My steamer trunk can wait here for a day or two. 
I’d better get my small bags--” 

“Yes.” 

He unchecked them. ... In the city car to the 
interurban station, she said: “Oh, Dicky, it’s so good.” 
Then after a pause, she added: “We don’t need to 
talk about ourselves.” 

“I understand.” 

“It’s days before your ship?” 

“Yes.” 

“I can show you around. It’s hard for me not to 
be troubled about The Public Square -” 

“Everything’s all right there. I’ll tell you every- 
231 






THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


thing when we get on the other car. You’ll like it all.” 

“And must you really go to India?” 

“I arranged with Nagar, before I left. It’s the story 
of the age, he says. After that-” 

“Yes?” 

“After that—New York.” 

They were in the Santa Monica car, on the way down 
to the ocean. She had shown him Hollywood, point¬ 
ing out some of the moving-picture plants. ... If 
he could only keep calm now—and not rush out to seize 
the incredible little attractions of the moment! It 
seemed so important to keep calm right now—as if 
this were a sort of trial trip. He must be able to move 
right into this light without flinching—must endure all 
delight in stillness. It wasn’t like repression—this that 
was called of him now, but faith. The wonder of it all 
was her perfect fearlessness with him. Their old word 
came back to him— comrade. He almost spoke it, but 
stopped in time. He must live it. But why all this 
holding back—after years of holding back? 

“ ... So he won’t be coming back, I’m afraid,” 
he was saying of John Higgins. “He understands that 
his desk is there for him as long as he wants it, but he 
doesn’t encourage any one to believe he’ll use it again. 
I told him he could do Washington, and leave Bert 
Ames on the desk for the present, but he only shook 
his head.” 

“I saw it coming,” said Pidge. “Oh, I’ve seen it 
for a long time. There was never anything I could 
do to help him. I never can really help when I want to.” 

232 





SEVEN FLAWLESS DAYS 


He felt she was thinking of Melton. She was, but 
she was thinking of Fanny Gallup, too. 

“He has no relatives,” Dicky went on, “but it’s ar¬ 
ranged for his income to keep up; anything he wants 
to do for the magazine-” 

He saw her look of sadness. 

“John Higgins is so helpless,” she said softly. 

“We’ve taken on young Both well for the advertising, 
and given him a little fund to work with,” Dicky re¬ 
ported. “Bothwell isn’t a plunger, steady sort of genius 
in his game. The idea isn’t to plunge in any department 
—just to work softly and slowly and steadily, giving 
everybody his money’s worth. Also, if a story or 
article just suits, we mustn’t let the price stand in the 
way any longer.” 

She nodded wonderingly. 

“Bert Ames has two or three good ideas to work 
out at the desk before he leaves for Washington.” 

“But who after that?” 

“Sit tight, Dicky.” 

. . . He coughed. “It isn’t like the desk in the old 
sense. We have talked about that. Pidge, I’m wab¬ 
bling a bit, but the desk is yours.” 

They were sitting in the windy front seats. She 
appeared to be looking into the back of the motor- 
man’s neck. 

“When you get back,” he added. 

Her eyes did not move. 

“This isn’t reward, this is your place; no other can 
hold down the job. You’ve done it for months. There 
233 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


wouldn’t have been any Public Square , if you hadn’t. 
I know all about the ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ story, 
and the editorial paragraphs and how you have kept 
up the reviews, and somehow got stories without money 
and without price. John Higgins told me everything. 
It isn’t giving you reward. It is only going on as you 
were, with some money to work with, and two or three 
good men to help, and a salary for yourself that will 
make up in a small way for the pittance you’ve been 
living on for years.” 

“There mustn’t be any desk, Dicky,” she said 
queerly. 

“What do you mean?” 

“I mean we’d be the laughing stock of New York, 
if I perched on a desk, calling myself the Editor.” 

She halted, thinking of what Miss Claes had advised 
about her authorship of The Lance of the Rivernais. 

“You’ll take it, Pidge?” he said with deadly calm. 

“I’ll do what I can until you come back. It must be 
managed very silently. No announcements. I’ll be 
there as I was. I’ve been thinking a lot. The Public 
Square —I know how dear it is to you, Dicky. It is 
to me, too. It will be wonderful to have some money 
to work with. I know about Bothwell. He’s the right 
man for the advertising.” 

“I left it open—for you to choose the one to help you 
when Bert Ames goes over to Washington.” 

Her eyes turned to him directly now, searchingly. 
There seemed to be something intelligible for him in 
them, but he did not divine the meaning. 

234 




SEVEN FLAWLESS DAYS 


“That’ll all work out,” she said presently. “We 
mustn’t try to plan it all now.” 

Her eyes filled with laughter. 

“Oh, Dicky,” she said, “if I’d ever get self-conscious 
about feeling all the responsibilities of The Public 
Square resting upon my shoulders—I’d muddle the 
whole business in a day!” 

“They have rested on your shoulders, Pidge.” 

“Yes, but I didn’t stop to think. ... In another 
minute you’ll be able to see the ocean!” 

They were silent. Then she pointed over the motor- 
man’s shoulder, and he saw a vast stretch of leveled 
azure, like sky ironed out smooth. 

“And—you’re—going—across!” she said suddenly 
—“still after the Big Story that you’ve always been 
looking for. And oh, Dicky, I’ll go to see them when 
you’re gone—your mother and aunt and sister.” 

“It did a lot for me to learn that you had called.” 

“Dicky,” she said solemnly, “when they told me 
what you’d done in Paris-” 

“Let’s not—Pidge.” 

“And when I remembered that Sunday afternoon 
you took me to your house—and what a beast I was 
—oh, how that hurt! I’ve been so sorry and so grate¬ 
ful.” 

He had seen Pidge with the baby in her arms. He 
had held the baby himself, in fact, while she got break¬ 
fast one morning, and their laughter had disturbed 
235 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


Mr. Adolph Musser, who felt that the world was no 
place for such laughter with his nerves in the condition 
they were. 

“His back feels so funny/’ Dicky had reported con¬ 
cerning the infant. 

Pidge gave him a look, and went on timing the eggs. 
Mr. Musser’s egg had to lie three and one-half minutes 
in water that had ceased to boil. 

“And his hair stays combed,” Dicky added. 

He had held converse with Mr. Musser, which was 
an experience. Mrs. Rab Gaunt Hastings had gone 
her way after a series of such experiences, her fortune 
undivided. It had been said that the undivided nature 
of her departure was in a measure responsible for Mr. 
Musser’s nervous breakdown, though he explained it 
metaphysically. Since he could not be left in his weak 
state, it was arranged for him to return with Pidge 
to New York. 

“I have known for many months that the field of 
my labors was to be amplified,” said Mr. Musser, with 
one of his sudden hopeful flashes. “My illness is but 
a cleansing in preparation. Always the wrecker before 
the builder. My throat, for instance-” 

Pidge called at this point from the fig tree back of 
the bungalow. It was their last day. ... For seven 
days they had walked the sunny silent mesas, traced the 
interminable canyons, and miles and miles of curving 
shore of the sea. To-night for him, the Valley train 
to San Francisco; to-morrow afternoon, the Pacific 
236 





SEVEN FLAWLESS DAYS 


Mail steamer. . . . She had spoken of Rufus Melton 
for the first time. 

“You think he was really married in France?” she 
asked. 

“They frightened him into it,” Dicky said. “It 
seemed to me as if Rufe looked upon it as a way out— 
then found that they didn’t mean to let him escape, 
even then.” 

There was no suffocating emotion about this talk. 
It was only in moments like this that he understood 
that he had earned something through the years. They 
had to go back to the bungalow for lunch with the elder 
and the child, who objected to each other. There was 
only a little while alone in the afternoon, because he had 
to be in Los Angeles for his train at six. 

“I started things going among the agents in New 
York, for a serial,” he said at the last, “but you’ll have 
to decide. We want a corking long story, Pidge—one 
that has brain and brawn-” 

Her face was turned away. 

“Just the right one should be lying around some¬ 
where,” he added. 

“I’ll look,” she said. 

She would have gone into the city with him, but he 
objected: “You would have to come back alone!” 

Their real parting was on the Palisades, and there 
were few words about it. 

“It’s work, now,” he said. “We go opposite ways 
for the same job—the Story of the Age.” 

“And after that—New York,” she answered. 

237 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


They stood in the superb sunlight at the edge of the 
escarpment. Hundreds of feet below was the old aban¬ 
doned bathhouse, and the three white lines of surf 
pressing into the land, like tireless fingers of a modeler 
upon the clay. To the left was the portal of the Canyon, 
to the right the fallow lands with feathery brushes of 
eucalyptus against the sky. 

“We’re all meshed yet, Dicky—meshed in wantings 
and struggles, all tracked up with recent experiences. 
We can’t see each other clearly yet-” 

He was looking into her face in half profile. Quietly 
it had dawned upon him that he couldn’t have spared 
a single one of the hard days of the past five years, not 
a single one of the black patches, even. They were the 
dark rooms in which this present striking film had been 
developed. 

“We can’t—what?” he said strangely. 

She was speaking, but still he didn’t hear, for that 
moment in the superb sunlight, he saw Pidge Musser 
as he had never seen her before. 





XL 

THE YANK DEVELOPED 


D ICKY reached Calcutta toward the end of 
March, 1919, and had no difficulty in learn¬ 
ing that the Little Man would be in Bombay 
within a week. Where Gandhi was at any given time 
in the Indian Empire these days was the most public 
of all facts. It was as if one entered a house and asked 
the children where their mother was. Both the native 
and English press were full of his sayings and doings, 
though he was seen and heard, of course, from different 
angles. The Rowlatt Bills had just been passed, and 
Dicky painstakingly looked into the nature of these. 

He heard that Gandhi was ill; that he scarcely could 
stand, in fact; but that he was speaking to great throngs 
every day. A few days ago he had talked to thousands 
on the Beach at Madras. Since then he had traveled 
to Trichinopoly, to Tuticorin, to Negapatam where he 
had addressed a monster gathering in the Nazir gar¬ 
dens, pledging the people to Satyagraha by thousands, 
and warning them with terrible warnings before they 
pledged, that the step they took meant self-suffering; 
that they must not use violence against the Government 
in thought or deed. 

Dicky crossed to Bombay immediately, hoping to 
find Nagar there. On the train a young officer of the 
239 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


military who had come from Singapore on the same 
ship with him, met an elderly friend of the civil service. 
They talked in Dicky’s presence. 

“But why don’t they arrest the fanatic?” the soldier 
asked. 

The elderly departmental officer smiled. “That’s 
what they all ask at first,” he said. 

“But, if he’s preaching sedition-” 

“He is also preaching nonviolence. British Govern¬ 
ment hasn’t a better friend in India at the present hour 
than this same little barrister. The people are upset 
over the Rowlatt Bills, and Gandhi is calming them 
down. Arrest him, I think not! . . .We have much 
to thank Gandhi for. He helped along enlistments, and 
now he preaches nonviolence. It’s all religion with him. 
He’s a political saint. The thousands follow him like a 
Messiah. Pretty safe sort of thing, to have a Messiah 
around advising the multitudes to turn their other 
cheek. Not that we’ve slapped one, you know.” 

In the sweltering core of the native city, Dicky found 
the house which Gandhi used as headquarters while in 
Bombay. Here a letter awaited him from Nagar, writ¬ 
ten at Lahore, advising him to look to Mahatma-ji for 
counsel; and hoping that they would soon be together. 
In his room Dicky sent out for an armful of recent 
newspapers and publications, determined to get the 
situation further in hand. 

... No question about India being a bit stunned 
over the passage of the Rowlatt Bills two weeks before. 
These measures provided that the ordinary criminal 
240 





THE YANK DEVELOPED 


laws should be supplemented, and certain emergency 
powers added by the Government to deal with anarchi¬ 
cal and revolutionary movements. The shock to native 
India lay in the fact that she had been led to expect 
that the measures adopted during the War would be 
mitigated, rather than intensified at this time. And 
Mahatma-ji was on the war path of the Soul. 

Gandhi reached Bombay on April third. He was 
followed by a great crowd from the railroad station to 
the house of his host. Dicky, who had watched from 
a distance the emerging of the Indian idol from his 
third-class coach, wondered if he were ever again to get 
the Little Man alone in a room as in Ahmedabad. He 
hadn’t been in the hotel an hour, however, before he 
received a message to accompany bearer to Gandhi’s 
headquarters. 

The native led him through the crowd without diffi¬ 
culty, and to an inner room where Mahatma-ji sat 
alone, both hands extended. Dicky sat down on the 
empty cushion before him. 

“It is good to see you again, Mr. Cobden. ... I 
regret that I was not in Bombay when you arrived; 
especially since it happened that Nagarjuna was needed 
in the north at this time, but we cannot think first of 
our own affairs. I am expected in Lahore on the tenth, 
but doubtless you will start for there or for Amritsar, 
which is very near, before that. Nagarjuna is now in 
Amritsar.” 

“I will wait and travel with you, if you permit,” 
Dicky began. 


241 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


The other smiled. 

“My way of travel is not yours, I am afraid. It 
might be interesting enough for just one journey, but 
I question the judgment of it. To be seen too much 
with me is to become persona non grata to the English. 
This would prove a detriment to the work you are to 
do. Remember that you are an American, and that 
basically the American spirit is above partisanship.” 

Gandhi was slightly changed. The wasted body was 
even lower on its cushions. The look of intense weari¬ 
ness was still apparent, but the look of fearlessness was 
enhanced. Dicky heard the humming of the charka in 
the next room as before. The fragrance returned to 
his nostrils. The old feeling stole over him of eager¬ 
ness to do something for the physical welfare of the 
man before him, something to make the mere enduring 
of life easier. 

“Physicians tell me that I should be very quiet,” 
Gandhi explained with a smile. “It is true that I was 
unable to keep all my appointments to speak on the 
other side of India, but in the main I am very active. 
The human body may be made to do what is required 
of it, after a fashion. . . . Yes, there are many 
changes. Our position is rapidly becoming one of di¬ 
rect opposition to Government. We were slow to real¬ 
ize these things. . . . Our movement depends for its 
success entirely upon perfect self-possession, self- 
restraint, absolute adherence to truth and unlimited 
capacity for self-suffering. In this manner only may 
we dare to oppose the Rowlatt legislation, and resist 
242 



THE YANK DEVELOPED 


the spirit of terrorism which lies behind it, and of 
which it is the most glaring symptom.” 

Dicky’s reaction was queer. He understood the 
point about the Government daring to leave this man 
at large, but didn’t Government see deeper than this 
placid mask? Of all keepers of the peace, Gandhi was 
apparently master; but in the fearlessness of the eyes 
that gazed on him now, Dicky fancied for a moment, 
at least, that he saw what British Government did not. 
The Little Man suddenly appeared to him as the living 
embodiment of the Enemy to all existing Governments, 
utterly terrible in stillness and poise. At the same time, 
Dicky didn’t lose for a moment his feeling of pity for 
the wasted figure before him, that tenderness which he 
could not even have explained to an American. 

“. . . I see you have been faithfully at work, Mr. 
Cobden,” the Little Man was saying now. “Some time 
I would have you tell me of your days on the French 
fields—what you found there after India—whatever 
you care to speak of experiences which evidently have 
brought you forward in kindness and understanding 
and peace-” 

“I am glad you find-” Dicky began in an embar¬ 

rassed tone. 

“It is well for me to tell you, but that is sufficient,” 
Gandhi added. “These are our affairs, not yours-” 

“I’m afraid I don’t understand that.” 

“We have a saying that one who is coming forward 
in attainment must not delay his progress by pausing 
to contemplate or analyze himself. One’s attainment 
243 







THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


rightly is the joy and affair of every other being but 
that one.” 

Dicky now felt that there was something to report to 
America in the story of Gandhi and his following of 
millions. For three days he was with the Little Man, 
morning and afternoon. Very sternly he had impressed 
upon himself the fatuousness of expecting anything like 
the old “miracle.” There was no need for that miracle 
now, Dicky informed himself gravely and repeatedly, 
for something of Pidge Musser ceased to be alive in his 
heart at no time, though much pain of yearning was 
connected with it and pity and human questionings. 
He had learned well by now that all really important 
experiences are spontaneous and can only steal into a 
mind that is emptied of anticipation and its own inferior 
pictures. 

But on the third day something came to him—as 
fruits from his dreary months of France. He had been 
speaking to Gandhi of the hideous directionless cam¬ 
paign days there. Suddenly, as he himself talked, the 
American Soldier in composite was unveiled before him 
—the game and grinning Yank, who had held fast in 
faith to but one thing under smoke and sun, against 
shock and night itself—his sense of Humor, the fun 
of the thing. 

Dicky saw the Yank, now. That was all there was 
to it. In the dark room of France the picture had de¬ 
veloped and the presence of Mohandas Gandhi now 
brought it out to the light. It was Dicky’s for all time, 
and his eyes closed with pain that his old friend John 
244 




THE YANK DEVELOPED 


Higgins had missed it—the one thing that one needed 
to know, to keep one’s faith in America, and to gamble 
even to life itself that the new order of nobleman should 
one day arise with laughter. 

. . . He walked the streets of Bombay afterward, 
and then wrote to Pidge late at night, though he was 
leaving for the north early in the morning. It seemed 
he could not wait to tell her. All the meanings of New 
York that he had caught as a New Yorker, in his own 
home and in the house of Miss Claes, as an exile in 
Asia and correspondent in France—fused into a sort of 
splendid synthesis at last. 

He saw ships coming from all Europe to New York 
Harbor—coming in through The Narrows bearing the 
emigrants of all Europe—passing under the Statue of 
Liberty—tiny seeds diffusing into the vast crucible of 
The States, running out from the meeting point of 
Manhattan on all the red lines of railroad, into all the 
green rivers, planting themselves in all parts, for the 
emerging of the New Race at last—the Laughing Men, 
the dense physical model of which he had seen in 
France. 




UNDER THE MANGOES OF CAWNPORE 



O haste, but no delay.” Gandhi had used 
the very words in suggesting that it would 
be well for Dicky to join Nagar in the 


north. The American telegraphed that he would reach 
Amritsar on the evening of the ninth, and made his 
way northward leisurely, stopping over in Cawnpore, 
for a full day. It was in Cawnpore, toward mid¬ 
day, after a two hours’ ramble in white dust and the 
killing colorless heat, that Dicky halted in the shade of 
a little grove of mangoes. He took off his helmet and 
mopped his brow with a piece of silk already damp. In 
the shade, at a slight distance (his left foot twisted into 
the ground), sat an ascetic who kept on with his mut¬ 
tering, not turning the way of the American. 

The look of an iron statue suggested itself. There 
were ashes, and worse, in the holy man’s hair, and in 
one empty eye socket. The hands were held out in 
space—twisted, seared hands, but so moveless that 
Dicky thought of the iron statue again. The wrists 
were thick and very strong. Cobden squinted his eyes 
back toward the pitiless Indian street, and then he per¬ 
ceived the Hindu’s face turned to him. A single vivid 
eye held him, as by the scruff of the neck. The voice 
was deep and resonant as from one who had learned to 


246 


UNDER THE MANGOES 


breathe, a rare art. The words in English were quietly 
spoken: 

“It is written, my son, that you are to come to the 
end of your search within six days.” 

Dicky edged closer, and asked courteously: ‘‘Do you 
really get it that way?” 

“So it reads in the crystals. To one who truly reads, 
the tale is one—whether read in the crystals or the 
stars.” 

The holy man lifted from between his thighs a hand¬ 
ful of stained and rusty stones. 

“You will go to a wall,” he added studiously. “You 
will enter through the gate of the wall-” 

“What wall, father?” 

“Who knows ? I see the wall. The end comes within 
six days, and there is tumult.” 

“The end of my life?” 

“There seems no surety of that, but it is possible.” 

The deep voice of the hathayogin went on: “The 
crystals foretell, but the wisdom and daring of man 
forestall. Had you not come to this tree, there would 
be no hope. As it is, you may come again to-morrow 
at this time.” 

“I’m afraid not, father. Whatever wall it is, I shall 
be one day nearer it, to-morrow.” 

Few would have noted the faint film of pallor under 
Dicky Cobden’s tan. As white men go, he knew some¬ 
thing about the Indian holy men. The more he learned, 
the more he respected certain rare types. There is a 
saying in India that the real mystic never begs. Dicky 
247 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


determined to learn the quality of the man before him, 
for he arose now to depart without offering a present 
in money. 

“Perhaps, father, from this meeting, I shall be wiser 
to face the fate that awaits me at the wall. ,, 

“You should be wise enough to take one day from 
your journey.” 

“I cannot take what is not altogether my own,” the 
American laughed. “I am saying good-by now.” 

He walked slowly out of the shade of the trees. 
With each step, his blood chilled a little, in spite of noon 
heat. He thought of The Public Square, of Pidge 
Musser at the desk there, of Harrow Street. Death 
had to come some time, but life wasn’t boring him just 
now. The sunlight of the open stretch stung his eyes 
with great weariness. The deep voice called from be¬ 
hind: 

“Stay, my pupil!” 

Dicky halted and returned, looking down into the 
apparently guileless and desireless eye. “Alms for the 
temple in Cawnpore,” the lips intone!’ 

“By all means, father,” the other said, no visible 
change upon his face, as he placed in the palm of the 
beggar several bits of silver from his purse. In the 
burning day again, he lifted a tired smile to the sun. 
No true mystic, perhaps, but what had this man seen in 
the crystals? 




XLII 

LALA RELU RAM 


N AGAR took him by the hand at the railway 
station in Amritsar on the evening of the 
ninth of April, 1919. The need for many 
words seemed past; there was quiet gladness. Dicky 
took up his quarters in the Golden Temple Inn. Under 
the lights at the entrance, as he passed in with Nagar, 
groups of Mohammedans and Hindus stood together, 
with self-conscious but eager shows of mutual friend¬ 
ship, and the American rubbed his eyes. 

If there was one thing in India that could be counted 
upon like Government itself, it was the mutual hatred 
of these two great divisions of native life. Dicky had 
heard in recent days much of the swift breaking down 
of these barriers, under the influence of Mahatma-ji, 
but he had seen no example of it working out like this 
under the lights of the Inn. 

“But what do the English think when they see the 
Hindu and Moslem kowtowing to each other—as at the 
door below when we came in?” Dicky inquired. 

“The Deputy Commissioner, the highest English 
civilian of Amritsar, looked upon a similar spectacle 
to-day,” Nagar said. “I did not hear him, but he is 
reported to have remarked, ‘There’s going to be a row 
here,’ and drank much cold soda water.” 

249 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“What is your work here, Nagar ?” 

“I have been working among the students at the col¬ 
lege of Lahore, and now here in Amritsar, working 
with the young men and women.” 

“Preaching Gandhi’s sort of peace?” 

“Yes,” said Nagar. 

“I still wonder that the English don’t ‘get’ the Little 
Man, Nagar.” 

“The Government regards him as harmless because 
he speaks of Soul-force. It deals with precedents; 
Mahatma-ji with ideals-” 

“You think the Government will arrest him sooner or 
later?” 

“Oh, yes.” 

“Won’t that stop or hurt the work?” 

“I remember,” said Nagar, “hearing the school chil¬ 
dren in New York sing, ‘John Brown’s body lies 
a-moldering in the grave, but his Soul goes marching 
on.’ A spiritual beginning never stops. Mahatma-ji 
has already brought his few spiritual principles into 
matter, into action.” 

“Tunnel,” said Dicky. 

“Night and day Mahatma-ji has been preparing his 
entire people to stand quiet and hateless; no matter 
what happens to him,” Nagar went on with a smile. 
“He tells them that in the event of his imprisonment, 
or even of his martyrdom, they would only wound 
his spirit, by answering the shedding of blood with 
blood-” 


They talked late. For fully an hour after Nagar left, 
250 






LALA RELU RAM 


Dicky sat by the open window, smoking to keep the 
insects away. Tobacco did not entirely quench the 
stale tired smell of the town. Even after he put out 
the light, sleepless hours passed, so it was late in the 
forenoon when he awoke, hearing cries in the street 
below. He crossed to the window. 

“Hindu Mussulmanki jai!” a voice cried. This he 
took to mean a native impulse to promote Hindu and 
Moslem unity, or something of the sort. Also he heard 
the cry repeatedly, “Mahatma Gandhiki jai!” Also 
Gandhi’s name associated with the names of “Kitchlew 
and Satyapal,” native leaders in Amritsar, of whom 
N^gar had spoken last night. Presently there was a 
knock at his door. A serious but friendly young 
Hindu in student’s garb bowed, entered and walked to 
the center of the room, saying in careful English: 

“From Nagarjuna I have come to be at the service 
of Cobden Sahib for the full day.” 

“Thank you. Is Nagar busy?” 

The student bowed again and proceeded: “My name 
is Lala Relu Ram and I am glad to come and make 
you acquainted with the disposition of the city.” 

The shouts were raised again outside. 

“What’s in the air?” Dicky asked. 

This was too much for Lala Relu Ram. 

“I mean the shouts below—is this another holiday?” 

“My people are gravely disturbed. Doctors Kitchlew 
and Satyapal have been sent for by the Deputy Com¬ 
missioner Sahib. It is feared for them by my people.” 

“What have they been doing?” 

251 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“In the terms of public speech they have cried out— 
also against the Rowlatt Bills, and for the amity of all 
peoples in Amritsar, Dr. Kitchlew being a Mohamme¬ 
dan and Dr. Satyapal a Hindu, which is anomalous.” 

Dicky was still unshaven, and there were some notes 
he wished to put down. 

“I’ll be ready to go out with you in an hour or less,” 
he said. “Would you not like to go down and get a 
line on what is going on?” 

The student confessed that he would, but plainly 
the American idiom “get a line on” fascinated him. He 
paused to inquire, and Dicky explained. 

“That is very good,” the student observed. “We 
are taught that the language of the future is to be made 
of most flexible symbols. I will get a line upon what 
is in the air and return.” 

He was back within a half hour saying that the worst 
had happened. Doctors Kitchlew and Satyapal had 
been arrested under the Defense of India Act, ordered 
to write farewell letters to their families, and been 
driven out of town, their destination unknown. 

“My people are gathering to go to the bungalow of 
the Deputy Commissioner with a fary ad (petition) 
that will remonstrate very firmly,” the Hindu boy said. 

“We had better be there, don’t you think, when the 
doings begin?” Dicky inquired. 

“Doings?” 

“When the performance is pulled off.” 

“Ah, tamasha!” 

“I think so,” said Dicky. 

252 




LALA RELU RAM 


They heard the slamming of boarded shop windows 
in all the native streets. The word for suspension of 
trade had gone abroad. The two pressed through 
gathering groups all making their way in one direction. 

They had passed through a stretch of bazaars and 
before them now was a carriage bridge over the rail¬ 
road right of way. On the bridge, they were packed 
tightly in the throng by the railings on either side. In 
a moment, the crowd in front halted and surged back. 
Lala Relu Ram gripped his arm queerly. Now they 
heard voices far ahead—angry voices in English—de¬ 
manding the people to disperse. The van of the crowd 
had been confronted by a police and military piquet, 
but the pressing forward did not cease. 

“My people are refusing to be stopped. They claim 
the right to make their plea,” the student whispered. 

Dicky was sinking himself into the purpose of the 
populace. As ever from his training, he sought to 
clear his mind of preconception and self-interest—so 
that the events might write upon a clean surface. Just 
now a shot was heard; a bullet sang overhead—then a 
volley. It was not until that moment that he remem¬ 
bered the dusty twisted ascetic in the mango grove at 
Cawnpore. But that was only two days ago, and where 
was the wall ? 

He found himself in the very quick of the Indian 
people—under the cuticle of India herself. India the 
timid, the terrible; India talking of Soul-force; India 
running with its faryad to the ranking English repre- 
253 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


sentative of Amritsar; explaining her griefs and her 
hurts to herself and to the English, seeing neither the 
humor of her plight on one side, nor its grimness on 
the other; India led about on a string which she might 
have broken with the flick of a finger. 

That was what India had always seemed most like 
to Dicky Cobden— hathis, the elephant, gentlest and 
strongest of creatures. For many generations she had 
been banged about by the shouts and blows of the 
white mahout , who was not in the cult of elephant lore, 
never a native of her habitat. He had made her stand 
around according to his own ideas—India, the great 
female elephant, full of tremors and flutterings; of vast 

strange delicacies and uncomputable powers. 

Now she was leaving her white mahout to follow about 
a little black man with an invisible string. 

“Mahatma Gandhiki jai! Gandhi Maharajiki rai!” 

Dicky heard the voice raised now in the lull that 
followed the first volley. ... A little black man 
with an invisible string, called Soul-force. 

One with the crowd, he felt its galvanic jerk of 
ugliness pass through himself. The murmur of pro¬ 
test that now arose from the open mouths was like 
something from himself—as if his mouth, too, were 
open with sound. A bearded native in soiled white 
garments turned suddenly and pressed him back. This 
man had felt a stone under his bare foot and he was 
making room to reach down to pick it up. Dicky saw 
his fingers stretch toward the muck. He understood. 
Here was one of the primal impulses of the human 
254 





LALA RELU RAM 


body in a stress of fear and hate. Far ahead, the 
English officers roared commands for the natives to go 
back. The voices of native leaders standing with the 
English, also implored the people to disperse. But the 
people had their faryad. They wanted talk. Also 
there were dead and wounded on the earth before the 
eyes of the front ranks. Another volley sounded. 

Instead of being driven back by the second pelting 
of shots, the native crowd crushed its way across the 
bridge. In the opening on the other side, it halted, now 
in the Civil Lines, no longer jammed by the narrow 
rails of the bridge. The throng had not yet become 
insensate; no individual had seized the office of leader¬ 
ship. This was the instant of all to Dicky Cobden, the 
turning point. The native gathering might still have 
been reasoned with, as it stood leaderless, looking upon 
its own dead; but instead of reason, came the third 
volley from the soldiers and police, the prod of the 
ankus that turned the elephant musth. 

The shuddering of revolt that the people felt passed 
through Richard Cobden as well—whipped up in his 
own breast. Then he was carried forward with the 
mob. Nothing gentle or yielding about the bodies 
now, a rough, bruising, muscular mass pushed from 
behind by incredible power. 

Dicky glanced about to look for Lala Relu Ram, and 
that instant was whacked to the ground, a slug from 
the pistol of one of the troopers, gouging his left 
shoulder. He arose to one knee, still turned back, a 
laugh on his lips, looking for the student. 

255 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


And now a most extraordinary shock was meted out 
to the son of the trowel makers. A running native 
with gray, patchy face, completely carried away by 
mob impulse, halted, stood above the kneeling white 
man, struck him in the face with both hands, emptying 
his mouth at the same time. Some of the natives im¬ 
mediately behind, without questioning but that Dicky 
was one of the English, now tramped over his body as 
they ran. Though fallen, he still preserved a final 
waver of consciousness—face down, head covered in 
his arms. Finally he was caught by the arm and jerked 
to the side. 

It was Lala Relu Ram who had pulled him out of 
the crowd and looked down into a face covered with 
blood and mud, and a welt or two. The only white 
about that face now was the lips which smiled and 
repeated a word which the Hindu student had never 
heard in all his linguistic studies of the East and West. 




XLIII 


HATH IS LAMENTS 

D ICKY really came to back in an apothecary 
shop on the way to the Golden Temple, where 
Lala Relu Ram had carried him. The filth of 
that face that had opened upon him as he looked up 
from his knee—a shudder about that, something he 
would never be able to tell. It had been uglier to take 
than the blows. As moments dragged on, he fell to 
wishing Nagar would come. A curious wonder played 
incessantly in his mind about the twisted ascetic under 
the mango trees in Cawnpore, but where was the wall ? 
The crystal gazer had repeated that the thing which 
was to befall would be within a wall. 

. . . The bullet didn’t think enough of you to 
stay, Mr. Cobden,” the young English surgeon said 
after examination. “It merely bit out a chunk of 
muscle and went its way. Since there is no cavity for 
it to drain into, it means nothing but a stitch or two, 
and a clean bandage. But you’ve been considerably 
mashed about the face. There’s going to be a strain 
on your drainage system for a few days to carry off 
dead tissue.” 

He was taken to his room at the Inn, much band¬ 
aged, and Lala Relu Ram sat by his bedside, his face 
257 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


often turned to the open window that looked out over 
the street. 

“I’m all right—don’t stay,” Dicky urged, as he 
began to understand the sacrifice of the student in 
remaining with him instead of following the mob. 

“Nagarjuna did not say for one hour, or for half of 
one day, but for the full day,” Lala Relu Ram declared, 
“and who knows but that I too might have disobeyed 
the orders of Mahatma-ji and become violent?” 

Dicky hadn’t much of a grin left, but such as it 
was, he was free to let it work under the folds of 
gauze. He sent the student below on one pretext after 
another, knowing that the young man was exhausting 
himself from strain to hear all that had happened. 

“It is more terrible than we supposed,” the student 
reported, as the long day ended. “Enraged by their 
dead and wounded, and being prevented from carrying 
their request to the Deputy Commissioner, my people 
have burned buildings, bank buildings—the National, 
the Chartered, the Alliance banks-” 

“That’s hitting them where they live,” said Mr. 
Cobden, impelled to Americanisms as never before. 

“Sir?” said Lala Relu Ram, bending forward on 
the scent of the idiom. 

“A Government bank is an English nerve center, 
Lala Ram,” Dicky said. 

The student was thoughtful, and then resumed: “It 
is with sorrow that I have to confess that my people 
have forgotten themselves in the case of Mr. Stewart 
258 





HATHIS LAMENTS 


and Mr. Scott of the National Bank and Mr. Thomason 
of the Alliance Bank-” 

“Hurt?” said Dicky. 

“Dead,” said the student, with a dramatic pause. 
“And that is not all. Miss Sherwood was most brutally 
assaulted, and outside the city a railway guard named 
Robinson, and a havildar in charge of the Electric, 
named Rowlands, were beaten to death where they live, 
and the station goods yard burnt-” 

Dicky’s eyes squinted under the cloths. “And what 
of your own people?” he managed to ask. 

“Oh, many have been killed!” 

This was an item that did not require the enumera¬ 
tion of details. Hathis had gone musth, but not for 
long. Hathis was horrified at the awfulness of the 
thing she had done. Hathis was back in her pickets 
again, not realizing her own hurts, anticipating a club¬ 
bing on the toes, and in the immortal way of hathis, 
half suspecting that a clubbing was deserved. 

“I’d like to doze a little,” said Dicky. 

The student rose, but lingered. 

“Would Cobden Sahib permit me to ask one ques¬ 
tion?” 

“Why, of course, shoot—I mean—ask it.” 

“It is about that moment when you fell,” said Lala 
Relu Ram. “Rather, it was when I reached you, and 
had driven off my people who thought you were one 
of the English-” 

“Yes.” 

“You were partly out of the body—unconscious. 

259 







THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


Yet your eyes were open and you were speaking some 
word that I have never heard—several times, as you 
would speak the Holy Name in devotion, with breath¬ 
ing.” 

“What was that name?” Dicky inquired, pulling the 
bandage down farther over his eyes. 

“It is not one which I have ever heard in my speech 
or yours—that is why I ask. It was like this, ‘Pid-gee— 
Pid-gee/ ” 

Dicky laughed. 

“That is—the fact is, that’s right curious,” he said. 
“I must have been ‘out of the body/ as you say. That— 
that is a little expression we use in childhood!” 

As Nagar stood under the light that evening, Dicky 
saw that his eyes, too, were burning with strange 
sorrow. Lala Relu Ram bowed himself out, walking 
backward. When they were alone, Nagar came to the 
bedside, drawing a chair, and his hand found the 
American’s. 

“We have not done well in Amritsar to-day.” 

“I don’t think you understand it quite,” Dicky said. 
“I was there this noon, at the place they call the Hall- 
gate Bridge-” 

“There was violence,” said Nagar. 

“There were three volleys-” 

The Oriental smiled. “It is not the provocation that 
we deal with, but the losing of oneself in anger. Noth¬ 
ing remains to us but the fact that Amritsar lost its 
self-control.” 


260 






HATHIS LAMENTS 


“You think the Little Man will be unhappy about 
what has happened, when he comes ?” 

“Mahatma-ji was arrested this morning at Kosi, 
served with an order not to enter Punjab, nor the 
district of Delhi, but to confine himself to the Bombay 
Presidency.” 

Dicky studied his friend. He couldn’t help feeling 

if Nagar had been at the Hallgate Bridge- Finally 

he spoke: 

“Pm just a reporter, Nagar. I’m not granting that 
Gandhi knows it all or that the natives to-day are all 
right, and the English all wrong. Still, I can’t help 
wondering at what you ask of your people—as a re¬ 
porter would ask, you understand. They turned the 
other cheek! They took the first volley and the second. 
I was there. No man has three cheeks. I saw it all 
in that minute between the second and third firing.” 

Nagar’s hand pressed his and Dicky lowered his 
voice, though his tone had not been loud. 

“Anything might have happened that instant had 
there been a bit of leadership,” he added. “The people 
wanted to talk to their father—the Deputy. You would 
have wept for their forbearance, or stupidity, as you 
like. Their dead were at their feet, the cries of the 
wounded in their ears, and still they weren’t maddened. 
They only wanted to show their f ary ad. If there had 
been the right Englishman on the spot—why, the crowd 
would have been allowed to go forward with its docu¬ 
ment. I’ve an idea that it was something dangerously 
like funk that caused that third volley, and that nobody 
261 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


will ever be so sorry for what happened to-day, as 
England herself. I call it human the way your people 
lost their heads.” 

“Mahatma-ji’s ideal isn’t human, Richard. It is 
of the Soul. We shall suffer and India shall suffer— 
for to-day.” 

“I’ve got a lot to learn about this man’s India. I can 
see that,” the American said queerly. 




XLIV 

THE SLATE AND THE SPONGE 


P IDGE was choosing a serial for The Public 
Square. The choice lay now between two 
manuscripts on the desk before her eyes. One 
was by a maker of the “new” American literature, 
named Carver, who had dared to perform the work in 
one sustained, slow movement, bound to ward off 
excessive popularity, a thing of drabs and tans and 
grays, but earnest, even in its hopelessness. It con¬ 
sistently portrayed a cross section of life, a fine piece 
of human observation, but altogether unlit with in¬ 
tuition. 

The other book was a novel of New York, by a 
woman whose name was entirely unheard of. This 
manuscript had been refused several times as a serial 
in the past year, and several times as a book prospect. 
The letters of refusal from the different editors were 
also on Pidge Musser’s desk. One said, “This book is 
too much of a gamble for an unknown name.” The 
united opinion of all professional readers was that this 
story was unquestionably an augur for the future of 
the novelist, rather than a compelling announcement of 
her arrival. 

In her own heart, Pidge believed that the woman’s 
story would interest more readers than Carver’s. Also, 
263 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


The Public Square would be saved considerable money- 
in taking the woman’s story, for Carver stood out for 
rather a high price for his first American serial rights. 

“It isn’t the freedom of ignorance,” she said at last, 
about the lower-priced book, “but it isn’t the freedom 
of knowledge, either. ‘A man is crippled while he’s 
learning technic.’ . . . No, I can’t take the chance!” 

So the novel by the unknown woman went back to 
Harrow Street with its refusals, and found a resting 
place in the drawer under the mirror that waved; and 
only Miss Claes and the author, herself, knew who was 
hurt. 

Mr. Adolph Musser, in New York with his daugh¬ 
ter, began to have callers. The two small upper rooms 
in Harrow Street were not adapted for callers, even in 
the adaptable Village. Especially this was so because 
an adopted male child of one year was rooted and 
ramifying in the place. One of the ramifications was 
a female lodger and one-time nurse who looked after 
the child while Pidge was away at the office. Mr. 
Musser, during his first week in New York, before he 
found an apartment in the Sixties, had pronounced this 
woman too heavy-footed to live with. 

Though Pidge had received an important increase of 
salary, dating from the first of this year of 1919, she 
did not find herself in a greatly improved condition 
when the additional expenses of nurse and her father’s 
separate maintenance were considered. However, 
something happened which she had not foreseen. Mr. 

264 




THE SLATE AND THE SPONGE 


Adolph Musser became rapidly self-supporting. Ac¬ 
cording to his predictions, New York proved to be 
suffering from a “biological hunger and thirst” for his 
very sort of metaphysic. Los Angeles had been sated. 
One had merely to move from temple to temple in Los 
Angeles. Cultists of all colors were there; light- 
bringers from all lands. Mr. Musser, according to 
predictions, found New York a virgin oil field and he 
was not long in getting his derricks up. 

Late in May there was a letter from Richard Cobden, 
mailed at Bombay in early April. Though it was 
written to Pidge personally she saw in it Dicky’s first 
real work, his first actual grasp and retention of 
essentials, to her idea. It opened to her, also, the linea¬ 
ments of the Big Story they had talked so much about. 
She read the letter through twice on the day it arrived, 
and that night took it home to read to Miss Claes, who 
came to the upper room in the latter part of the eve¬ 
ning, as she had come to hear The Lance of the 
Rivernais, over five years ago. Their faces were close 
together, and Pidge read low and rapidly: 

I have been with Gandhi several times in the past 
three days, and early to-morrow I start north for 
Amritsar to join Nagar. I hadn’t thought of writing 
this until just now, on my way to bed, and the subject 
of the Little Man suddenly filled me. I feel an un¬ 
adulterated American to-night, and there may be an 
advantage, at least an angle, in a study of Gandhi from 
that point. . . . He is very ill, can scarcely stand, 

but more than ever full of his kind of light and power. 

265 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


In the last three days with him, I have come to under¬ 
stand you as never before—and America and the 
American soldier. I have found out, Pidge, what you 
mean by stating and living the fact, that it isn’t how 
much one knows that counts, but how much one does. 
Gandhi is a doer. I used to hear in church something 
about the Spirit being made flesh, and now I’ve got an 
inkling of what that means. Gandhi’s genius doesn’t 
dream. It does. The sun shines on all India, but 
Gandhi has become a lens. The rays focalize through 
him. The ground burns under his feet. . . . He is 
called a bigot, a fanatic, a living Blue Law, and it is all 
true, Pidge. He is drawn in black and white. He has 
no half-tones, no twilights, no afterglows. He is devoid 
of atmosphere as the moon. His lines of light and 
shadow are never blent or diffused. He is vivid noon 
where his light strikes, densest night where light ends. 
. . . It is not that he loathes the West, but that he 

knows the East. He has become a specialist, as Nagar 
says repeatedly. He has withdrawn his attention from 
the world to India, Herself. He has brought in his 
eyes from the future, to the Now. He sees the next 
step which India must take, and leaves to the dreamers 
of the world to point out the glories and the penalties. 
He stands in the road in front of India to-day, like a 
man before a runaway horse- 

Dicky had ended the letter suddenly, saying he was 
sleepy, but had more to say later. The two women 
talked low, because of another in the room. This other 
was not to be disturbed. They stood over him now. 
He would not have approved at all of their gayety and 
266 




THE SLATE AND THE SPONGE 


know-it-all manner, had he been awake. His lids were 
down, however; the black curving lashes reposed in 
their hollows; the world, which was the big horse he 
must some time ride, was away minding its own busi¬ 
ness. 

“I’m glad to hear this much before I go-” Miss 

Claes stopped and took both of Pidge’s hands. 

“Before you go—where ?” 

“This little slate of Harrow Street is all written over. 
It is to be rubbed out now, Pidge; My part is finished 
here—I don’t know how well, but it’s finished. I am 
leaving New York.” 

“Why, that — that seems — insupportable! . . . 
Why, I thought anything could happen but that—to 
my New York!” 

“Only you are to know, dear,” Miss Claes said 
moments afterward. “Yes, it is India-” 

“To Nagar—you are to be with him—the Hills!” 

“Don’t, Pidge. It isn’t for words-” 

“Forgive me-” 

“These are terrible days for India. It means work— 
work—tests for every one’s courage. Little Harrow 
Street is still and steady, compared. . . . But this is 
dear to me—the thought that I go ahead to make 
ready for you another place to come-” 

“My upper room,” said Pidge softly. “My upper 


room. 









XLV 


AMRITSAR, APRIL 13, 1919 


T OWARD the end of the afternoon of Sunday, 
the 13th, Richard Cobden ordered a carriage. 
He was still bandaged about the head, his left 
arm in a sling. This was his first descent from the 
room since his hurts on the 10th, and meanwhile Gen¬ 
eral Fyatt had taken control of the city, bringing in 
troops from nearby stations. Dicky had met Fyatt in 
France, and was on his way now to pay his respects 
to the General at his Headquarters in the Ram Bagh. 
He was getting it very clearly just now that if it were 
observed that he had any sort of affiliation with the 
natives, he would promptly be placed out of reach of all 
Punjabi events, even as a spectator. 

The American was personally and intensely inter¬ 
ested in Nagar and Gandhi, but still he did not feel 
that he had taken sides in the least. He looked upon 
Gandhi’s work as visionary, and the work of the British 
in India as substantial, and the more likely to endure. 
He had seen Nagar but a moment or two each day 
since the 10th, and had kept in touch with developments 
through the English sources. 

The air was still furiously hot, though it was after 
four in the afternoon. The streets were crowded, this 
being the day of the Baisaki fair, and thousands were 
268 


AMRITSAR, APRIL 13, 1919 


in from the country. Dicky heard the roar of a ’plane 
over the city, and craned out of the window of his 
half-closed carriage for a glance at its flight. The pilot 
was making circles over a point at a little distance 
ahead—a low peculiar hovering. 

Dicky inquired of his driver the meaning, and was 
told that the ’plane appeared to be hanging over the 
great crowd assembled in the Jallianwalla Bagh—that 
thousands of the visitors attending the fair were there, 
listening to the speakers, as well as many townsfolk. 

“But didn’t the General give orders for no public 
assemblies ?” 

The driver had not heard. Dicky reflected that the 
’plane didn’t appear to be there for the amusement of a 
crowd—no circus ’plane, but an effective bit of govern¬ 
ment property, rather, with an air of business. It rose 
now and vanished over the city. 

The carriage continued on the way to the Ram Bagh, 
until it was halted for the passage of troops in the 
street. A half-hundred Gurkhas and Baluchees, two 
motor cars with English officers and civilians, the whole 
outfit trailed by a pair of armored cars, and moving in 
the direction where the government ’plane had hovered. 

“Where are they going?” Dicky asked of his driver. 

The man was not sure, but suggested the Jallian¬ 
walla Bagh. 

“'What is that place?” 

“It is a maidan the man said, “a big open square, a 
public place.” 

“Public square,” Dicky muttered. “Turn in short 
269 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


after the armored cars/’ he commanded the driver. 
“Follow close.” 

“Ram Bagh is not so.” 

It is a difficult proceeding, requiring formalities, to 
alter one’s orders in Asia. 

“Listen. I am changing my purpose. Not Ram 
Bagh, but Jallianwalla. Turn in after the soldiers— 
now!” 

The driver obeyed, but was hurt and murmuring. 

To Dicky, that afternoon, Amritsar was a place of 
heated and offensive stenches. As they passed through 
hot and narrow streets, certain of these odors startled 
his comprehension, because they were so subtly vindic¬ 
tive. The thought occurred to him, as he watched the 
naked children playing in the wet shadows, of what a 
correspondent had remarked in Cawnpore: that it was 
hard to tell whether the streets soiled the children, or 
the children soiled the streets. The movement forward 
was very slow, and Dicky bent to inquire at length if 
they were still moving toward Jallianwalla Bagh. 

“Yes, it is very near,” said the driver, churning at 
the lines with both hands. 

The American did not let himself think further. He 
fell into his old queer absorption; the reporter of his 
makeup taking him over. He shut out Amritsar from 
mind; the Native Idea, the English Idea, and his own 
that hovered between. He was just a stranger in a 
half-closed carriage looking out from under a bandaged 
brow. He heard the flies in the air. He did not seem 
to have any mental guard to shut out that distracting 
270 




AMRITSAR, APRIL 13 , 1919 


buzz—flies winging across the vapors of filth. They 
came to a narrow lane, a kucha, the driver called it. 
The armored cars ahead were having difficulty in this 
constricted place. Finally they halted and Dicky heard 
a British soldier on the nearest turret call out that the 
cars could proceed no further. 

His own carriage was of course blocked. The kucha 
appeared less than eight feet wide. He was still lame, 
and had not intended to do much walking about in the 
furious heat, but beyond the armored cars he had 
glimpsed the Gurkhas filing forward and the officers 
stepping out of their machines. He let himself to the 
ground, ordered the driver to wait, and followed the 
soldiers through the wet trampled lane. 

A minute later he was in the broken ranks of the 
Gurkhas—little muttering men with big sprawly hands 
holding fast to their rifles, fingers running loosely over 
breech and stock and barrel. The halt had come be¬ 
cause there was a sudden rise to the ground—a mound 
of earth closing the lane, and running at angles to each 
side. The soldiers were ordered up and deployed along 
the mound; equally divided to the right and left. 

Now Richard Cobden, in the midst of the officers 
and civilians who had occupied the two motor cars, 
also gained the eminence with some pains; and at this 
point he saw the man he had started out to find that 
afternoon—General Fyatt, a significant picture, indeed, 
here in Amritsar, who had been but a small obscure 
exhibit in the broad gallery of France. 

Fyatt didn’t see him, and the American looked over; 

271 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


the vast assembly of natives in the burning light. On 
a raised frame toward the center, a Sikh speaker stood. 
Dicky could hear his words, but did not understand. 
He saw, however, that the coming of the soldiers had 
interrupted the tenor of the speech and that many of 
the people were frightened and drawing away. An 
English officer beside him, after listening a moment, 
spoke with an ironical laugh: 

“We have nothing to fear. Sarkar is our father and 
our mother. Government would not injure its chil¬ 
dren - ” 

Dicky realized that the young officer had quoted a 
translation of words the Sikh speaker had just spoken 
to the people—from twelve to fifteen thousand in the 
maidan, he reckoned. All faces were now turned to the 
soldiers—waves of faces. It was as if the color of a 
tree had changed by a steady pressure of wind that 
showed the under side of all the leaves. A nervous 
laugh from the young Englishman who had inter¬ 
preted; then from General Fyatt, the low single 
sentence: 

“You may give the order.” 

“Fire!” the young officer called to his Gurkhas. 

To Richard Cobden it was quite incredible, but 
another officer on the far side of the lane repeated the 
command, and the line of leveled rifles spurted on either 
side. Dicky winced at the crashes. He had been in 
the firing pits many times, but one can never remember 
how these concussions close by hurt one’s head and 
spine. ... Of course, they were firing blanks. This 
272 





AMRITSAR, APRIL 13, 1919 


was Martial Law. The people had been ordered not 
to assemble and they had disobeyed—twelve thousand 
of them, or more. General Fyatt had undertaken to 
impress upon them that his word was Law, Martial 
Law. Of course, this was also the English answer to 
April ioth, at the Hallgate Bridge. A bit uncouth to 
stampede a big crowd like this. 

Surely Fyatt couldn’t have realized what this firing 
of blanks would mean. 

They were trampling themselves to death already. 
This wasn’t English humor. It was more like the 
fool who yells, “Fire!” in a packed theater. 

The great open place was walled. There were no 
broad exits. The several narrow vents had locked of 
themselves by the pressing of bodies against them. 
“Why,” Dicky thought, with a wrench and shiver at 
the sight of the monster throng in the process of 
constricting itself, “why, this is a womb of death!” 

Cries were sustained at the end of this April holi¬ 
day—cries of battle and accident and pestilence, the 
cries from a great ship going down. 

Dicky thought of a pot beginning to boil. He 
thought of a yard of leaves suddenly caught in a 
swirling wind. He thought of all the old stale similes 
used and over-used since bloodshed began, and his 
mind sank back in the hollow of hopelessness. It 
couldn’t be told, but his faculties tried again and again, 
even though his heart sobbed with the people. 

A great square of colored cloths in the sunlight— 
from twelve to fifteen thousand human beings listening 
273 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


to a man who cried out against violence, who cried out 
that Sarkar couldn’t hurt his children—suddenly being 
ground in the great crush of Fear, being sprayed with 
rifle fire—blanks, of course—but to a result almost as 
deadly, for the people were destroying each other. They 
didn’t mean to, but they were trampling each other to 
death. Thus his mind viewed and reviewed—all this 
in a matter of seconds. 

Now Mr. Cobden saw something he didn’t under¬ 
stand. Down in the maidan on the ground, not fifty 
feet away—a giant Sikh in white turban, running for¬ 
ward with raised hands, like a messenger—a close-up 
possibly for Dicky’s eyes alone—suddenly halted, spun 
and slapped limply to the ground with a curving fling. 
A glorious fall, if it had been a bit of acting—the fall a 
man makes when a bullet hits him. 

But Dicky was quite possessed with the idea that the 
soldiers were firing blanks. 

At this point, an English officer roared at his 
Gurkhas, who apparently had been firing high. His 
words were in vernacular, but the American saw the 
little dark men shorten their range. 

Thus it dawned upon him slowly, as if he were a 
very stupid man, that Fyatt was punishing Amritsar 
indeed—in fact, that the General was making a day of 
it. Also at the same time it dawned upon him that the 
public square was walled. He had seen the wall before, 
partly formed of buildings, but it hadn’t properly regis¬ 
tered in connection with the words of the twisted 
ascetic of Cawnpore. 


274 




AMRITSAR, APRIL 13, 1919 


Now he knew also that the several narrow throats 
of the walled square, none so wide as the kucha through 
which he had entered, had become points of intensified 
death, because the great throng had divided to crush 
itself against these impossible apertures. The English 
officers appeared to be directing the fire of the soldiers 
toward these points where the maddened masses were 
most dense. 

Almost directly across the square the wall was low, 
less than six feet. Hundreds were jammed against it, 
but their bodies were so locked by the pressure from 
behind that no one could climb or be pushed over into 
safety. 

The Gurkhas looked like monkey men. They 
stamped queerly as they pumped. They were being 
told what to do and were in a great concentration to 
obey exactly. They emptied their magazines, each 
man taking his own time, and halted to fill them again, 
carefully avoiding with their fingers the burning metal 
of the barrels, as they refilled and fired. 

An English civilian, an elderly man, face livid, 
bumped Cobden’s wounded shoulder, as he lurched past, 
muttering: 

“My God! I can’t watch this.” 

Another Englishman followed him, venting an hys¬ 
terical laughter—-both faces Dicky had seen in one of 
the motor cars. For an instant it seemed the only sane 
action left in the world—to rush out into the lane the 
way he had come, as these Englishmen were doing, to 
275 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


cover face and ears, to rush forth, to continue to the 
ends of India and the uttermost parts of the earth. 

Dicky started to follow, but turned back. ... No, 
he wouldn’t rush off to be sick. This was the wall that 
he was to come to. It was something else. . . . What 
was it ? Oh, yes, it was the Big Story that he had been 
pacing up and down the world to find. . . . Of course, 
it would be like this. He would find himself in the 
midst of it, without knowing at first. 

He ducked forward under the rifles of three sepoys 
to reach the staff. He couldn’t go away without paying 
his respects to the General. Was not this what he had 
started out for to-day ? He stumbled over a soldier on 
his knees—a Baluchee, vomiting with all his might. 
He saw Fyatt a few paces forward—Fyatt, grizzled, 
square-shouldered, behind a field glass. A mocking 
laugh rose in Richard Cobden’s heart. A man didn’t 
need a field glass to cover the maidan. One could see 
the faces; one could see the fallen; one could see the 
writhing cords of human bodies. Oh, no, one didn’t 
need a field glass. One could see the thousands on the 
maidan now—as one up-turned face, the face of a 
child betrayed, but unable to believe. Fyatt merely 
chose this way to cover his own face. His back looked 
stiff and blocky as he swung slowly around behind the 
glasses. His shoulders and neck didn’t move. He 
turned from the hips, Dicky perceived, as he touched 
the General’s sleeve. 




XL VI 

THE HOOKED MAN 


NOTE of unison had come to the great cry 



from the people at this moment—one note that 


**■ tugged at the white man’s soul—the deadly 
hurt of a child. . . . General Fyatt was not tall for 
a soldier, with square lines of figure; square of chin 
and temple and shoulder and elbow, pivoting on his 
hips. But there were two remarkable curves in the 
ensemble, the sidewise curve of the hooked nose and 
the bow of his booted legs. Now as the American 
stood by, a new key presented itself to the man—that 
hooked smile. It opened other hooks—hook of the 
eye-corner, as well as the corner of the mouth and the 
bent nose, hook of the fingers on the field glass. The 
face turned to him—a white welt from the glasses on 
the bridge of the nose. 

Dicky felt the horrible slowness over everything— 
that somehow there was not in this man’s volition the 
power to order the firing to cease. No recognition 
showed in Fyatt’s eyes. He stared. It was like the 
man who had stared at him on the docks in Bombay, 
when he heard that America had entered the War. 


Dicky felt rebuked. Then came to his ears again 
the terrible drowning cry of the children, and he saw 


277 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


Fyatt differently—not as England; at least, not all of 
England—a black crooked finger operating merely— 
the face of England turned away. 

“I only wanted to ask-” Dicky stopped and 

raised his voice above the tumult of shots and voices. 
“Cobden of New York—saw you in France!’’ 

It was utterly ridiculous to yell one’s identity. He 
had forgotten that his face might look different under 
a bandage. The field glass that had been partly raised 
again was whipped down. The hooks tightened. 

“Ah, Cobden. Heard you were in town. Busy, you 
know!” 

“I see!” the American yelled back. He felt like a 
maniac. “I see! I merely wanted to ask, General, 
if you had gone mad—or have I?” 

A young officer ran between them reporting that the 
ammunition was running out. 

“Sixteen hundred and fifty rounds, sir. Mainly used 
up. Some of the men finished-” 

“Ease them off back to the armored cars. Let the 
others finish firing—fire low.” 

“Not much wasted—only at first, sir!” 

Fyatt turned to Cobden, shouting staccato sentences: 
“Didn’t catch what you said. Teaching Amritsar a 
lesson! Plover says we ought to take a thousand for 
one! Teach them to assault women-” 

“Isn’t the lesson taught?” This time Dicky didn’t 
yell. 

“They haven’t dispersed yet.” 

278 






THE HOOKED MAN 


‘‘Dead men can’t disperse, General. The rest can’t 
get out-” 

Dicky walked away. He had looked again at the 
maidan. Everything was overturned. The thousands 
were prone or kneeling. ... If one steel rifle bullet 
plows through sixteen inches of oak—how many hu¬ 
man bodies will it plow through? How many will 1650 
steel bullets? ... No shots wasted since the first 
minute or two. They couldn’t be all down—wounded 
or done for. Suddenly Dicky realized that many of 
the people were now praying. He was back at the head 
of the lane, moving in circles like a man who has been 
beaten on the head. ... A black-coated English¬ 
man with a clergy’s vest, grasped him by the arm, 
peering into his face—eyes gone utterly daft. He 
shook Dicky’s arm and pushed it from him; then ran 
to a soldier near by and peered again. 

“Tell it to the General,” Dicky called absurdly, but 
his words weren’t heard. 

Now he saw one of the elder civilians who had 
escaped a few moments before, coming back. This 
person scrambled upon the mound from the lane side 
and inquired of the earth and sky: 

“I say—can’t he stop?” 

“He’s dispersing the people,” Dicky answered. 

The firing was desultory now. He heard orders for 
it to cease entirely. 

“We might need a cartridge or two in the streets 
going back-” a voice behind him said. 

279 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“We’ve got the armored cars-” another an¬ 

swered. 

Then Richard Cobden happened to look at the west 
and found the sun still high in the sky. This struck 
him as altogether peculiar. 





XL VII 

IN THE WARM DARK 


C OBDEN found himself in the lane, turned 
away from the maidan, his hands lifted and 
clenched. From behind still came the sounds 
of a ship going down—all but down, the firing ceased. 
In front of him, the sepoys were running low as if to 
escape. It made him think of ball players leaving the 
field in the summer dusk after a game, running through 
the crowd to the clubhouse. The armored cars were 
backing out before him. 

. . Of course,” he kept telling himself, “it 

had to come this way—end of the old story, the begin¬ 
ning of the story of the age. This isn’t an English- 
Indian story. It’s a story of all the world.” 

Only natives were about him—ashen-lipped, mutter¬ 
ing, frightened, dazed. He continued through the 
kucha, following the armored cars. He must get to 
the hotel. He had something to write, copy to file. 
But this delusion did not carry him far, before its 
absurdity struck home. The outer world would never 
hear of this story, until it leaked through by letter or 
word of mouth. The cables had been tight before. 
They would be drum-tight now. 

Vaguely and dully he realized that all things were 
changed for him for all time. The reporter in his 
281 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


makeup that had blithely set out for Jallianwalla Bagh 
was done for, all aloofness of the spectator gone—the 
little poise of ego which had carried him so well and 
so long, so far as associations with men went, up and 
down the world until this hour—that ego poise was 
leveled and smeared. Amritsar’s public square—the 
massacre in the maidan had cloven him, and into the 
opening all India had rushed. The face of the hooked 
man came back to him—hard unto silliness, the English 
stare against the sinking city. 

He had overtaken the nearest of the armored cars. 
He looked upon them strangely, their sleek integration. 
They had not been needed; India had died and been 
born again without them. Something similar had 
happened in himself. No casual reporter now—one 
living emotion, rather—one fire, one fury, a burning of 
unqualified pity in every cell that held his life. 

The driver of his carriage hailed him. Cobden lifted 
his hand in return, but halted. Suddenly he realized 
that he didn’t want to go back to the Golden Temple 
Inn. The thing alive in him now was bigger than a. 
story to be written, bigger than the finding of a free 
cable, which was not in India. He paid the driver and 
stemmed his way back against the people that thronged 
the lane. He knew now that he must keep his mouth 
shut in an altogether different way; that a new life, 
terrible in its potency, had seized upon him, was some¬ 
how being born in his flesh and brain. He must hold 
still—hold still. 


282 




m THE WARM DARK 


“Sixteen hundred rounds in ten minutes,” an English 
voice reiterated. 

Dicky’s head bowed under his helmet. He was slow 
to believe that the firing had lasted only ten minutes. 
It amazed him now that this was still a world of hot 
daylight. He looked back upon his coming through 
this lane as one does upon the last memory before a 
great sickness. He had to memorize and register again 
and again upon his faculties that he had alighted from 
his vehicle only fifteen minutes ago, and this was all 
one day, all one afternoon, all one quarter of an hour. 
In the interval there had been death and birth for 
India and for himself—a mysterious conception, at 
least. 

“God forgive me for losing my head,” he muttered, 
for there was something in him that still counted 
losing one’s head as the first moral offense. He was 
thinking of the moment standing before Fyatt. He 
would move very quietly now. As he reclimbed the 
mound where the sepoy firing line had stood, it came 
to him that a man might lose his head for a moment, at 
least, to find his heart. 

He let himself down from the mound to the bloody 
ground. There he found presently a man wedged 
under the bodies of two already dead. He dragged this 
man loose, only to find that he was apparently bleeding 
to death from a shattered knee. He unwound a turban 
from one of the dead men and wrapped the wound, 
knotting it tightly above the flow of blood. His own 
left hand was impeded by the sling. Presently, he freed 
283 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


it entirely, his personal scratches appearing ridiculous 
in this broad field of bloody men. Thus began his 
work. It was as if he had entered single-handed upon 
a task to alter the sewerage system of a city. 

There were no English about, no police or native 
soldiers. Martial Law had done its part and gone to 
supper. The people flocking into the maidan with 
moanings and horror-stricken cries now were those 
looking for their own. From the farthest parts of 
Amritsar they were drawn, from many houses to which 
one or more did not report for the evening meal. Liv¬ 
ing men and women—hurrying, bending—hands reach¬ 
ing down, hands pressed to faces—the quick and the 
dead. 

A while afterward he looked up to find that the sun 
had gone down. His knees were wet with blood. He 
felt the wet spreading heat upon his left shoulder. His 
wound had opened from exertion—a smile at that. 

He had worked a little on battlefields before, but 
they weren’t like this. A persistent thought held him 
that this was the field of his own dead! He didn’t 
understand how his brain could deal with such weird 
stuff. He concluded that he was in a half-drearn where 
thoughts appeared veritable that wouldn’t hold water 
when he fully waked. 

Now he had extricated from the mass near the 
Hasali Gate the body of a trampled girl child. She 
was warm, possibly not dead. She smelled of the 
earth and tears. . . . His heart thumped, and pity 
like a warm breath surged through him—pity, which 
284 




m THE WARM DARK 


some one said was the pain of love—oh, yes, that was 
Miss Claes’ expression. He touched the girl’s long 
coarse black hair in the thick twilight. 

His lips formed with explanations and thoughts as 
he worked—the things he would tell Pidge, the way he 
would tell these things to Pidge. He placed the un¬ 
conscious one down at the feet of a native doctor who 
was binding wounds, but often raising his eyes to 
heaven in prayer that the soldiers might not come 
back. 

Dicky stood up in the warm dark, lifted his helmet 
and mopped his forehead with his grimy right hand. 
He could actually smell what horses smelled (as he 
remembered in France and Arabia) when they snorted 
and ran aside. . . . The dead would never end— 
hundreds of dead—public square covered with dead. 
And what was pulling at his brain—something trying 
to gain admittance? He had it now. Pidge Musser 
was close again; close as she had come in the Ashrama 
—not weeping, horrified, not in the least dismayed or 
hopeless by all these lifeless ones on the ground, but 
the spirit of swift-handed helpfulness, utterly in accord 
with him in thought and purpose, no words being 
necessary. So this was why he had been standing in 
the dark with uncovered head, rubbing his hand over 
his brow—that her closeness might come through to 
him! Not so weird, after all, that he should know 
this, standing upon the soaked turf of the maidan. 
Things of this kind had often happened to soldiers on 
the battlefields of France. 

285 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


Was this what it was all about then—the separation, 
the struggling—at last to become connected to her this 
way, though across the world? He mustn’t study it 
too closely. He had a warning that he would spoil it, 
unless he kept on heartily with the work. So he con¬ 
tinued separating the wounded, but every little while 
when his hands were free he would stop and uncover 
his head to the moist warmth of the evening. Would 
she come nearer and nearer through the years? . . . 

And these were her dead and her dying, and she had 
blessed the little Hindu girl with coarse black hair. 
He smiled at the absurdity of his thoughts. 

Now it was full dark and the cries of the living 
women across the maidan were raised in agony because 
they must leave the Bagh before the curfew sounded. 
Hundreds were still searching. They had not found 
their own, but it was close to eight o’clock and this— 
the dead on the field—was what had come of breaking 
Martial Law to-day. It did not matter that lives might 
still be saved if the wounded could be taken out from 
the dead. Sarkar had fired upon them to-day. Sarkar 
would come with more death, if they disobeyed. Hus¬ 
bands dragged away the women whose faces turned 
back. 

Richard Cobden stayed on. He had the sense of not 
being alone. Moreover, there was much to do. There 
were voices to answer. He heard cries and callings 
from the windows of the houses that overlooked the 
maidan. No English came that night—but the pariah 
286 




IN THE WARM DARK 


dogs from all the city and outskirts. They moved like 
ghouls in the shadows. There were mysteries every¬ 
where—white vapors from the ground. He saw and 
felt the unutterable; became rich for future years in 
that one night with the fruits of sadness. 




XL VIII 


“INDIA’S MESSENGER” 

OBDEN walked back from the maidan through 



the streets of Amritsar in the dawn. He did 


not feel like a foreigner. That which had 


happened during the night had furnished him with 
what rarely comes to a white man—the Indian point 
of view. He was in the Indian fabric for the moment, 
at least; no longer a spectator from the West. He did 
not hate England, not even the crooked finger that had 
mismanaged for England. He knew something right 
now that he might not be able even to remember—more 
sorrow than anger. 

As he approached the Golden Temple, near which 
was the Inn, Nagar appeared in the street, and they 
walked together in silence. As he tottered a little, 
Nagar’s arm swung around him and Dicky said: 

“Don’t. I’m very dirty.” 

Now that the light was coming on, they saw people 
hurrying to the Jallianwalla Bagh. 

In the room, Dicky said: 

“Make a lot of tea, Nagar. Sorry you won’t join 
me in a little drink from the flask.” 

A moment later, he said: 

“I think after all, you’ll have to help me get off this 
shirt. I’m a rubbed-in mess of blood and dirt.” 


288 


“INDIA’S MESSENGER” 


Nagar perceived that the body of the American 
trembled full length; also that his clothing was soaked 
with blood from the wounded shoulder, as well as 
from stains received from handling others. 

. . Some of them crawled about in the dark!” 
Dicky was saying. “A woman sat there moaning 
through the whole night. The pariahs came—I heard 
them lapping, lapping. From the windows of the 
houses around the Bagh came the cries of the women 
who dared not disobey the curfew. . . . Why, that 
ten minutes of firing was longer than whole years I 
lived as a schoolboy, but the ten hours since dark— 
that passed, Nagar, like a man walking by a house, not 
a lame man. ... I saw your India, oh, yes. The 
gentlest-tempered crowd I ever moved through, but 
something dangerous and deadly in its pain and grief. 

God help us—when you wake up-” 

Nagar helped him. Dicky bathed his neck and face 
and hair copiously with one hand, and then washed the 
left arm. With Nagar’s help the wound was packed 
>vith clean lint. Dicky drank hot tea, filling his goblet 
several times and shivering, though the heat of the 
night was still in the room. Finally he sat down in his 
bathrobe by the open window and lit a cigarette. The 
sunlight had found the gold of the Temple dome. 

. . I actually forgot myself,” Dicky repeated 
“When an American forgets himself, Nagar, you can 
be sure a big show is being pulled off. . . . I’ve 

smoked too much, talked too much. I am going to lie 
down for a little—until breakfast. . . . Bed! Think 
289 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


of having a bed, in Amritsar. A bed with sheets. 
. . . Out there so many were lying on the ground. 

Oh, I say, Nagar, where will they put them all?” 

The Hindu’s cool, slim fingers reached over and 
touched his hand. He didn’t speak, just kept his hand 
still, and Dicky found it easier to stop talking, because 
of that hand; easier to endure the furious forces of 
activity in his brain. Finally Nagar spoke: 

“I had to stay with the students. They wanted to 
go to the maidan. That would not have been well, but 
it was well for you to be there—to forget yourself 
there through the hours. It will come forth from you 
for years—not as the voice of an American, but as a 
citizen of the world. You have prepared long; last 
night India found you prepared, and dared to show 
you something of herself. Miss Claes would be very 
glad to be here with us this morning.” 

Dicky’s mind fumbled with the idea that he had not 
only come closer into the Indian heart, but into Nagar’s 
as well. 

“You might sleep a little until breakfast. I shall not 
leave you until after that. You are very tired and 
spent, but you will not be injured from last night. 
When a man forgets himself, as you say, he is strangely 
replenished.” 

But Dicky did not sleep. They breakfasted early 
and Nagar arose, saying: 

“. . . In the days that you remain in Amritsar 

finishing your work (for last night will mean more 
and more to you as the days go on) you and I shall not 
290 




“INDIA’S MESSENGER” 


be much together. What you see in Amritsar—you 
must watch without feeling or partisanship. One can¬ 
not tell—you may see strange things. Remember, 
always remember, that you are American; that as an 
American you have no enemies, and belong to the 
world. In the fusion of all Europe, which America is, 
to form a new type of nobility, remember that no 
country has furnished a nobler ingredient—than Eng¬ 
land. And forgive my many words, Richard, if I ask 
you to remember this also: that anything which might 
happen to me here in Amritsar in the days you remain, 
must never make you forget that you have a message 
to carry to America.” 

“I don’t understand, Nagar.” 

“It is difficult to say. I can only repeat: Anything 
which might happen to me in this city must not arouse 
in you a personal or partisan effort to help me. We 
must be strangers—unless I come to you alone. The 
English are beside themselves; they know not what 
they do. You must have no feelings about me—to 
betray you. Go further into the English. Forget me— 
except as a part of your own source of kindness and 
strength.” 

Nagar was gone. As Dicky conned all this, he 
began to wonder if he would see his friend again. All 
the days before this in Amritsar, he had been waiting 
for things to get quiet so that he and Nagar might 
really begin to get together. . . . “India’s mes¬ 

senger,” he muttered, as he fell asleep. 




XLIX 

PIDGE TRIES GRAMERCY PARK 


T HE second part of Dicky Cobden’s letter about 
Gandhi written after his three interviews in 
Bombay, reached Pidge fully a fortnight after 
the first. Of course, it interested her, as it could no 
one else. 

. . . From several angles I placed before Mahat¬ 
ma-ji, the concept of dreamers of all countries—the 
dream of the mating of the East and West, that the 
New Race is to be born of this mating; that globe 
means globe, and a world citizen must belong to all; 
that as Goethe says, “above the nations is Humanity.’' 
This thing, you understand, has attracted me merely as 
a concept, not with the dreamer’s fire at all. Short 
work Gandhi made of the mating of the East and West. 
The damsel, New India, is not ready for marriage. 
She is not clean. She has not found herself, therefore 
has not herself to give. (These are not his words, 
but the idea.) She must become free, before she has 
anything to bestow. She is just a perfumed body, 
which the West has already desecrated and begun to 
despise—merely an offering now, not a wife. What 
Gandhi arrays himself against to-day is the fact that 
India has already fallen under the lure of the West. 
She has felt the fascination of his big toys, the glamour 
of his mighty works. The Little Man has made me see 
292 


PIDGE TRIES GRAMERCY PARK 


that a woman who “falls for” a man, can never become 
the man-maker which a wife must be, maker of her 
husband as well as child. Queer, how it came to me 
that way first, before I saw the man’s side of it—the 
great thing you have done, pushing me back, forever 
pushing me back into myself, until that day when I 
shall be able to stand, not “fall for” you. I am learn¬ 
ing—learning so slowly what I bargained for that night 
at the Punjabi Fireplace. “. . . Go back into your 
house!” Gandhi cries to India. (Not his words, you 
know; merely my picture of him.) “Fast and pray. 
That is safe. Fast and pray and spin! Pray to the 
hum of the charka. Forget your lover. Find yourself. 
You are the East, the inner. Already you have been 
lured by his brutal boyish games. You have flattered 
him, but already he despises you. What does he bring 
now, but a bloody carcass to your hearth, saying, 
Arise. Gut and skin.’ ”... Mahatma-ji is on 
the ground Now, To-day, seeing but one step—the 
next step—crying, “Go Back!” This is the most 
extraordinary part to me, that his very limitations 
appear to be in use! 

In early July, Pidge made her first move since com¬ 
ing to New York. The spirit had gone out of the 
house in Harrow Street for her, with Miss Claes’ 
departure. She sent the boy-baby up into the country 
and took a room at the Sennacherib in Gramercy Park, 
a step of which Rufe Melton strongly approved: 

“You were getting stale down there, Pan,” he said, 
one night when he came to dine. “The Village is all 
right for a novelty, but real New York hasn’t time for 
293 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


that sort of thing. I see you’re running Carver’s novel 
in the P. S. What did you get in on that for? Did he 
give it to you?” 

“Rather not. It cost real money.” 

“A hang-over from John Higgins’ desk?” 

“No, we took it after—after-” 

“Carver could never have slipped that over on you, 
Pan,” he broke in, “if you had lived uptown. But no, 
you never would listen to me, that a thing isn’t great 
because it’s nasty-” 

“You think it isn’t a successful serial?” 

“Not a chance-” 

There was truth in what he said. The new novel 
was rapidly unreeling in generous installments, without 
much gratifying noise from the readers. 

Rufe confided that he was doing a long story, and 
that Redge Walters was very much interested in it as a 
serial prospect. 

“What’s it on?” she asked. 

“Business,” said Rufe. “Shipping—grain—iron— 
packing-houses. Everybody’s panting for business 
since the War.” 

“Sounds American.” 

“Epic of the Great Lakes, Pan. Never knew what I 
was about, till now——” 

She was thinking of Amritsar—of the first Amritsar 
mail recently in from Richard Cobden, posted at 
Pondicherry, French India—of hathis and her new 
mahout —of British bulletins, native documents, and 
Dicky’s own straight story of April ioth and 13th. It 
294 






PIDGE TRIES GRAMERCY PARK 


had been difficult for Pidge not to become too excited 
by all this. For the first time Dicky’s work had carried 
her off her feet. That had been days ago, and she had 
not altogether trusted her fiercely fresh enthusiasm, 
but it didn’t subside, and at the present minute, the 
epic of the Great Lakes sounded to her like a forlorn 
side show. Moreover, Dicky’s Amritsar story, about 
to be printed in The Public Square, took away most of 
the disappointment in that Carver’s novel hadn’t proved 
a powerful stimulus to circulation. 

“Its capital is Chicago,” Rufe further divulged about 
his book. “Funny how you have to get away from 
there to see that big town. All the years I lived in 
Chi—never got next to her, as I have since I came to 
New York. . . . Yes, it’s booming along. Haven’t 
been really right until just now, since I was gassed.” 

“I’m glad, Rufe.” 

“It’s got a mahatma in it,” Rufe chuckled. 

“A what?” 

“What’s the matter with you, Pan?” 

“That word—from you!” 

“You look as if you’d seen the Dweller-” 

“The what, Rufe?” 

He chuckled again. “Didn’t know I’ve been going 
in for the occult, did you? Say Pan, there’s one fine 
thing about you. I never feel as if you could be 
disappointed in your Rufie.” 

“Why is that?” She was entirely off his trend. 

“You haven’t started to expect anything of me. 
. . . Oh, yes, had to have a mahatma in the story. 

295 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


It’s the new thing. Everybody’s got one since the War. 
Not enough to go round. . . . This mahatma of 

mine in Chi is wise to the stock exchange. It’s his tip, 
you know, that the whole tale turns on. Reader never 
thinks of it—until it’s pulled.” 

“Where did you get your model?” 

He laughed again. “Right in the family, Pan. Been 
going to hear Adolphus. Say, you never did appreciate 
your father. Bad habit of yours, Pan, honest to God— 
to lose respect for a man just because you live with 
him.” 

Pidge was in a whirl. Her hands dropped down to 
the seat of her chair on either side and gripped hard. 
The world looked about as big to her as Delaware; 
Amritsar and New York signaling to each other. 

“Heard him this afternoon—in the ballroom of the 
Pershing —swell crowd out,” Rufe pursued. “Talked 
on Lytton’s Zanoni. Pm going to read that book. 
And didn’t Adolph put it over to the damsels and dow¬ 
agers! Just what I need for my white mahatma. 
Where does the old man get all that? It’s a wonder 
you haven’t gotten in on your father’s stuff, Pan.” 

She wanted Miss Claes as never before. This was 
too much for one small person to hold. When she 
really listened again, Rufe was asking to go upstairs 
with her to see her room. 

“It’s just a common room. What’s the use?” 

“Little afraid to see me alone, eh, Pan?” 

“Not afraid—only what’s the use?” 

“You might see it different-” 

296 




PIDGE TRIES GRAMERCY PARK 


“I might have once, Rufe-” 

"Say, Pan-” 

“Yes?” 

"Does Mrs. Melton want to be free?” 

Her hands dropped to the seat of her chair again. 
She saw the new want in his eyes and something 
else—the old captive thing. 

There were two possible answers to his question, and 
it took every minute of her twenty-five years, and all 
that had gone before, to choose. This is what she 
said: 

"Mrs. Melton will never be free!” 

"What—what do you mean?” 

"Ask your mahatma, Rufe.” 






DICKY'S IDEA WORKS 


P IDGE felt the hugeness of life around her at 
last. Doors were being opened as never before. 
She saw as clearly as if Rufe Melton had con¬ 
fessed to her, that it was he who wanted to be free. 
She could grant this well enough; having been forced 
to it, in effect, from the beginning. He would doubtless 
come again soon, making it plain that he wanted her to 
agree to divorce. The point was that certain barriers 
and limitations in her own life were suddenly lifted. 
It was as if she had emerged from a city, to the shore 
of the sea, and before her eyes was an unbroken horizon 
line. 

The abrupt extension frightened her. The story of 
Amritsar now unfolding for her from the Indian 
mail—in its hatelessness, in its devotion to truth and 
unsentimental love for the people—unveiled for her 
eyes a man —not Gandhi, not Nagar, but Richard 
Cobden, himself. The few sentences he had inserted 
in his letter about Gandhi, “—the great thing you have 
done, pushing me back, forever pushing me back into 
myself, until the day when I shall be able to stand, not 
fall for you!”—in these words there was for Pidge 
an invincible call. 

She had searched the language for another expres- 
298 


DICKY’S IDEA WORKS 


sion to convey what that little slangy verb “to fall for” 
meant. It was one of her treasures. When one “fell 
for” a person or thing—one couldn’t stand for the 
same. One was captive, not co-worker. Here was 
the difference between infatuation and romance. Dicky 
had found it out. There was expressed in his letter 
more than she had dreamed as possible; and this time 
words thrilled her furiously, because she believed they 
had become working knowledge, before it had occurred 
to him to express the idea. She saw this knowledge 
working out in his studies of Gandhi. He did not 
“fall for” the Little Man. He did not rush into 
eulogy; he sought to understand. In a word, he stood 
for Gandhi. But now that Dicky was ready to stand 
for her, she was ready to fall, and all her horizons were 
being pushed back to give her room. 

. . . She was very weary. She had not known 

it before. The Public Square thrived. It was strong 
pulsed with new life. For the first time in her experi¬ 
ence she sensed from the magazine’s field, following the 
issue of the first Amritsar story—silence, the perfect 
tribute, the instantaneous readjustment of all other 
journals; then crowded mails, the answer from people 
everywhere. Something about Gandhi touched hun¬ 
dreds of people to the point of saying so, in a letter to 
The Public Square. 

Yes, she was weary. She had held grimly to the 
post. She wanted to turn it over to Dicky Cobden 
now. ... It had been like this once before—on the 
night of Somebody’s Shoulder. She had wanted to 
299 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


give him what he wanted that night—the tiredest and 
most hopeless girl in New York. Only that night it 
had been—for what he had. Now it was for what he 
was. 

John Higgins lost his bearings in the city traffic. A 
copy of the issue containing the first section of the 
Amritsar story was in the old editor’s hand when he 
fell in the street. She was with him for several hours, 
until the end. He looked at her long and strangely— 
eyes more “run-out” than ever. He did not seem to 
hear her words, but if she remained in silence too long, 
a little frown gathered on his forehead, and his hand 
would pull at hers. He had waited for the big story. 
Once he said: 

“I wish Dicky would come,” and that brought 
Pidge’s slow tears. 

The next day a solicitor called at the office and Pidge 
still felt squally. She couldn’t grasp what he was 
saying. She thought it had something to do with a 
secret society that was going to attend an absurd mat¬ 
ter, known as “obsequies.” She was deluged in words. 

“. . . Be perfectly calm, Mrs. Melton,” the 

solicitor said at last. “This isn’t exactly bad news, but 
I’ve known lasting injury from the one, as well as the 
other-” 

“Please—what are you talking about?” 

“Your legacy-” 

“My—I don’t-” 

“From the late John Higgins-” 

300 








DICKY’S IDEA WORKS 


‘‘But it was only last night!” 

“The late John Higgins, nevertheless. The de¬ 
mise-” 

“And what about it ?” 

“That he has left you—this paper in my hand 
being the memorandum—his interest in The Public 
Square ” 

“Me-” 

“A half-interest in the ownership, to be exact-” 

Pidge glanced around the room. The man was 
sitting. The first and terrible obstacle of life was to 
remove him, or escape from him. 

“What have I to do?” 

“Just sign-” 

But he was still sitting, after she had signed. He 
wanted to be sociable. . . . She was on the car going 
home. She hopped off at Eighth Street, and was 
turned into Harrow, before she realized that she didn’t 
live there any more but in Gramercy Park. . . . 

Curving Harrow Street was quiet and calling. She 
went in to the curve and stood before the old green 
front. A sign on the door announced “Rooms, Per¬ 
manent and Transient.” . . . “What kind of rooms 
are transient rooms?” she thought. The curb and 
doorstep thronged with memories. “Oh, Dicky, it’s 
too much,” she whispered at last. “Come soon, and 
prop me up!” 








“WE LOOK UPON WOMEN AS SACRED’ 


D 


,0 you people want peace or war? If you 
wish for war the Government is prepared 
for it, and if you want peace, then obey my 
orders and open all your shops; else, I will shoot. For 
me the battlefield of France or Amritsar is the same. 
I am a military man and I will go straight. Neither 
shall I move to the right, nor to the left. Speak up, 
if you want war. In case there is to be peace, my order 
is to open all shops at once. Obey orders. I do not 
wish to have anything else. I have served in the mili¬ 
tary for over thirty years. I understand the Indian 
sepoy and the Sikh people very well. You must inform 
me of the budmashes. I will shoot them. Obey my 
orders and open shops. Speak up if you want war.” 

General Fyatt was talking to a large company of 
Amritsar’s native representatives, lawyers, merchants, 
doctors, in the kotwali, the day after the massacre. 

The Deputy Commissioner added: “You have com¬ 
mitted a bad act in killing the English. The revenge 
will be taken upon you and upon your children.” 

The large company of natives listened. Not one 
spoke of the Jallianwalla Bagh, or of the dead which 
still lay there. Richard Cobden reasoned with himself; 
neither did he speak. Out of all the burn of feelings 
and the great waste of ineffectual thoughts, it was 

3°2 


“LOOK UPON WOMEN AS SACRED” 


dawning upon him that in their own good time, the 
dead of Amritsar’s public square would speak for 
themselves. 

In the days that followed Dicky worked quietly, 
worked from the standpoint of the English almost 
entirely. He “exposed” himself like a film to the 
aftermath of the tragedy. He went after facts and 
statements. It was never to be ascertained, the number 
of killed and injured. The English granted about 
three hundred dead; the natives claimed five times that, 
even more. He was much at Headquarters; and con¬ 
fined himself altogether to the Civil Lines. Through 
Lala Relu Ram, he received certain secret reports from 
the native point of view, and guarded these little tissues 
assiduously. A cigarette case contained them all. 

He went each day to the Crawling Lane, as one 
doing a city beat for a newspaper would call at city 
hall or recorders’ court. This was the place where Miss 
Sherwood was assaulted by the natives, on the ioth. 
It was narrow and thickly populated, with double-story 
buildings on either side, and numerous blind alleys 
shooting out of the lane. 

The crawling order remained in force for eight 
days. Although General Fyatt called it “going on all 
fours,” and it had been called the “hand and knee 
order” by the press, the process consisted in the persons 
lying flat on their bellies and crawling like reptiles. 
Any lifting of the knees or bending thereof brought 
the rifle butts of the soldiers and police on the native 
backs. 


303 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“But, General,” Dicky said cheerfully, “people are 
forced to crawl through there or go without food and 
medicine—people who have never seen Miss Sherwood, 
much less taken part in the assault.” 

“She was beaten,” General Fyatt declared. “We 
look upon women as sacred.” 

“Ah,” said the American. 

In the Crawling Lane and elsewhere were erected 
tikitis for flogging. These were triangles of wood, 
upon which the hands could be suspended and tied. A 
general order was issued for all the native population 
of Amritsar, a city of one hundred and sixty thousand, 
to salam to English in the streets. Those who did not 
salam were arrested, often flogged. Many of the peo¬ 
ple were so terrified, that they dared not sit down 
anywhere outside of their own houses, lest one of the 
English appear suddenly and not find them standing 
and in position to salam. 

During the late days of April, Richard Cobden did 
not see Nagar, though occasional brief messages 
reached him from his friend through the students. 
One of these was a suggestion, which Dicky followed, 
to send off whatever mail he had ready, in care of one 
of the young men who was leaving for Pondicherry, 
French India. Finally there was the episode of the 
tennis court, in the Civil Lines. Dicky drew up to the 
crowd. 

A set of doubles or singles was not in progress. 
This was a game of triangle—a tikiti in the center of 
the court; a naked native strung up and being whipped. 
304 



“LOOK UPON WOMEN AS SACRED” 


Dicky had seen about enough of this, and was ready 
to turn back, when something of the carriage of the 
native’s head arrested his eye, and started a peculiar 
sinking in his heart. 

The bare back was toward him, but the face turned 
sidewise revealed the profile of Nagar. His hands 
were strapped high toward the top of the great frame 
formed in the shape of the letter A. Nagar had been 
stripped to the loincloth, his head bare, his white robes 
and turban cloth flung upon the turf. The stripes were 
being put on by one of the native police. The whip 
was a rigid canelike affair, but longer than a walking- 
stick. A detachment of native soldiers was drawn up 
on one side, police on the other. Two young officers 
of the military, one of whom Dicky knew, were in 
charge of the affair. 

Dicky had halted, hand to mouth. Each stroke 
blinded his eyes; his body became, for an instant after 
it, like a house in flames with every curtain tightly 
drawn. Then he would see the sunlight before the 
next stroke, and the naked man with bleeding back. 
He had direct need to turn his back upon this thing— 
the old nausea. It never occurred to him that this was 
his own great test, greater than Nagar’s, for such 
tests of the human heart do not come announced; but 
out of all past experience, one thing stood in the midst 
of a rocking universe—that if he did anything in this 
red blindness, he would do worse than nothing. 

He walked away, his elbows jerking up as another 
stroke fell. The thing that saved him was already 
305 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


accomplished. The turning of his back was all that 
was required, apparently, since in this instant he got a 
life and death grip on the word Messenger. Was he 
Nagar’s friend or India’s messenger? 

Then he knew just one furious smearing doubt. 
What of human loyalty—to stand by and allow this 
thing to go on? He was answered in his mind from 
Nagar’s own words, “Mahatma-ji’s ideal isn’t human, 
Richard. It is of the Soul.” Action of a foreigner in 
behalf of a native would only intensify the English 
fears and the native’s plight. To rush in was John 
Higgins’ code. Evidently there was another. 

He walked around to meet Nagar face to face. Ten 
feet away, he stood until Nagar’s eyes came up to his. 
Had Nagar’s hand been free to lift and command 
Silence, his lips free to speak, the word could not have 
been more fiercely impressed. Indeed, the word Silence 
seemed to have been shot into the American’s con¬ 
sciousness. 

A blow fell. Nagar’s eyes closed; his lips stretched 
out as if struck by an invisible hand. Then under the 
trailing eyelids, Dicky saw a look of inexpressible 
gratitude and relief—the barest beginning of a smile. 
Nagar had found him fit to trust. It was another 
moment of real life, that moment of the look, another 
instant of essential recognition. 

“Oh, I say, Cobden—have you seen a ghost?” 

It was Langoyer, one of the young English officers, 
who spoke. He was leaning upon his cane, to flick a 
306 




“LOOK UPON WOMEN AS SACRED” 


cigarette stub off the court with his boot. Langoyer 
paid no attention to the flogging. The men attended 
to that, you know. One had to stand by—as one would 
wait for his horse to drink. 

Dicky was now being lashed to the quick himself. 
He had seen clearly—but a sort of hideous night had 
settled upon him again. He had to watch his temper. 

“How many does this man get, Langoyer?” he 
managed to ask. 

“Thirty.” 

“What for?” 

“He knows more of the sedition of Kitchlew and 
Satyapal than he’ll tell.” 

The figure had gone limp on the triangle. 

“Fainted,” gasped Richard Cobden. 

The whipping stopped. A tin bucket of water was 
brought and dashed upon Nagar’s face and shoulders. 
A moan came from him because he was not quite 
conscious. Then the knees drew up and his feet felt 
for the ground. 

The lieutenant stepped forward taking Nagar’s ear 
in his right hand and calling aloud: 

“Will you tell the truth now of Kitchlew’s plot 
against Government?” 

Nagar looked at him without hatred. He tried to 
speak twice before the words came: 

“I have already told the truth-” 

“How many stripes have been given?” Langoyer 
asked. 

“Twenty-six.” 


307 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“Finish the thirty, then take him to kotwali. A few 
days more will make him tell all right.” 

The American remained. One—two—three—four. 

The hands were unstrapped. The robe was cast 
about the shoulders. Nagar could stand. Dicky left 
the officers and followed his friend and the native 
policemen to the station, feeling like a pariah’s whelp. 




LII 


THE OLD FACE 


D ICKY reflected that there were two ways of 
looking at a person or a thing, a fact proven 
several times in his experience. There had 
been a moment in the presence of Gandhi, after many 
minutes of talk, when the face, that had been dull and 
unattractive as a camel driver’s, had suddenly appeared 
to him with memorable, essential significance. It had 
been so with Miss Claes: also the moment when he 
had really seen Pidge, as they stood together on the 
Palisades of Santa Monica. Recently he had caught 
an immortal something in the look from Nagar on the 
rack. 

He did not see Nagar again in Amritsar, but up to 
mid-May the students reported that his friend was still 
imprisoned. The sound of those falling strokes was 
slow to die out of the corridors of Dicky’s memory. 
They awoke him in the night. It was far easier, how¬ 
ever, to recall the splendor of gameness in the way 
Nagar had taken his beating. This satisfied every 
American instinct; and even above this, was the mys¬ 
tery of compassion for the English, in Nagar’s face. 
Here was a man on a tennis court in a remote Punjabi 
town, hardly heard-of in this war-racked world, plainly 
putting over the thing he had marveled at, as a small 
309 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


boy in Sunday school: “Father, forgive them, for they 
know not what they do.” 

Apparently the same majestic composure. Life held 
many things; yet Richard Cobden couldn’t be sure al¬ 
together, that he had not outraged the spirit of friend¬ 
ship in failing to register his protest of word and deed. 
Of course, the consequences might have been disas¬ 
trous, but, at least, a certain man-to-man loyalty would 
have been satisfied. 

If further tortures were inflicted upon Nagar, Dicky 
was not informed. The Amritsar story was no longer 
on the outside; it was in Richard Cobden’s brain and 
heart. He wrote some of it and his letters were for¬ 
warded, but still he conned and brooded. Having held 
still through the whipping of Nagar, he found it easier 
to stand in the midst of current events without losing 
his head, or letting emotion or opinion have right of 
way. 

Late in May, a student brought word that Nagar 
was free and had gone south. This was all that Dicky 
had been waiting for. Crawling, salaming, flogging, 
imprisonment and forced testimony had long since be¬ 
come to him a full and bitter cup. At the station, as 
he waited for his train, a student, edging near, managed 
to whisper two words: 

“Ashrama, Ahmedabad.” 

The American’s head bowed slightly. He had 
meant to go to Ahmedabad anyway. 

He was not met at the station there, but a servant at 
the Entresden told him to go at once to the Ashrama. 




THE OLD FACE 


He obeyed, and found himself listening for the voice 
of Mahatma-ji, as he entered, but his eyes searched 
the shadows of the hall for Nagar, a kind of breathless 
pain about it all. 

As the door of an inner room opened, at last, and the 
native who conducted him drew back, Dicky saw a 
woman standing in the dimness. Her face, turned 
toward him, was a mere blur of darkness, but there was 
a leap toward her in Richard Cobden’s breast. Then 
he stood before her, in a daze of joy, one hand in hers, 
one upon her shoulder. 

“It happened very quickly in New York,” she told 
him. “A letter saying that I was coming could hardly 
have reached you before the steamer that brought 
me——” 

“But, Miss Claes—New York! What are we to 
do—no Harrow Street?” 

“You will know what to do,” she said. “And about 
the things that were in your rooms. I had them care¬ 
fully boxed and sent to your mother, who was well 
when I left. Also your aunt and sister.” 

He took from his pocket the old dark key to the 
“parlor” door. She bent and touched it. 

“Keep it, Richard,” she said, “until I send you an¬ 
other.” 

“And Nagar-” he began at length. 

“He is here.” 

“And well? I could get so little word.” 

“Nagar has been hurt, but is healing. Look-” 

3ii 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


Dicky turned to find his friend standing behind them 
at the door. He had felt a presence there, but thought 
it was the native who had brought him. Nagar’s eyes 
looked very large in the wasted face. 

“Oh, yes, all is well with me/’ he said. “I have been 
sorry to leave you so much alone in the north. . . . 
Yes,” he added, “it was harder for you than for me— 
the test that day on the tennis court. You were brave, 
my friend. I knew all was well—when the instant 
passed and you remained silent.” 

“How do you mean—all was well ?” 

“I knew that the message of India would get to 
America—since you did not spoil it by defending me.” 

Nagar turned to Miss Claes, adding: 

“I saw the fury and fright rise in his eyes, and all 
the impulses of ethics of the West—then silence over 
all. It was as if we were cemented-” 

Dicky remembered that last word afterward. 

As he moved about and talked, he was vaguely con¬ 
scious of watching the other two together. It was as 
if Pidge would want to hear of every gesture and de¬ 
tail. Miss Claes was less Indian here than in Harrow 
Street. There he had thought of her as belonging to 
the East; here she seemed of the West. Something of 
the composure he had noted oji the tennis court had 
come to stay in Nagar’s eyes. As moments passed, 
Dicky knew that they contained deep vitalities of mean¬ 
ing that would appear in coming days. 

It was as if his limitations were being stretched, but 
by consummate hands. There was repeatedly brought 
•312 





THE OLD FACE 


to him, from them, something that he refused to hear 
or dwell with: that he had done well, that he was 
deeply approved of in their sight; that there was much 
more to take place between them as a group, even 
though they were to stay in Asia, and he was leaving 
for The States. . . . Then all faces turned, and in the 
doorway stood the Little Man. 

No one spoke, but to Richard Cobden it was one 
moment of his life that he thought of as religious. 
Mahatma-ji came in between them, and Dicky felt the 
old urge somehow to help with his hands; the sense, 
too, of all India thronging, whispering around them. 
For a moment the four had been standing in silence, 
when they heard the sweep of bare slow feet in the hall, 
and now an old dark face was in the doorway, a smile 
serene as nothing else on earth but the Hills themselves 
—a dark wrinkled old face, and she came forward and 
stood very low and little in the midst of them— 
Gandhi’s comrade. 

In San Francisco, waiting for the departure of his 
train east, a card was sent up to Cobden’s hotel room. 
It was from Chris Heidt, the managing editor of his 
former newspaper connection. 

“Hello, Cobden. Just noticed you were off ship. 
What did you bring back?” 

Dicky reflected. “The story of Amritsar,” he said 
finally. 

“Amritsar, what’s that?” 

“The first big story I ever ran across. I feel like 
313 




THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


one of Job’s servants, who said he alone remained to 
make a report.” 

Mr. Heidt had been much on trains during the past 
few days, and had missed the fact, so far, that The 
Public Square had begun to publish the story. 

“Not going to bury it in a weekly, are you?” 

“I have much more than The Public Square could 
use in months. It really should get out into the broad 
market. The end of one world and the birth of another 
took place that Sunday in Amritsar—all in miniature, 
you understand-” 

He spoke of Gandhi, whose name had scarcely been 
heard at this time in America, and touched upon the 
story of maidan. 

“Sure,” said Mr. Heidt. “Sure, it’s a big yarn, but 
months ago. No way to substantiate it. You’re a lit¬ 
tle out of perspective, Cobden, seeing it all first hand 
that way.” 

“I can substantiate it,” Dicky said queerly. 

“I know, but the whole story’s a trouble-maker. Far 
as I can make out, this Gandhi is a sort of sanctimoni¬ 
ous Lenine, and we’re not promoting any kind of 
Lenines just now. Red roughhouses all over the world, 
but we’re not advertising the fact. The best newspaper 
interests here and in England are letting that sort of 
thing die down. Everybody’s healthily intent on get¬ 
ting back to business right now. Make a corking fic¬ 
tion setting—your Amritsar—series of short stories 
that would do no harm.” 

Thus Richard had his American perspective restored. 





LIII 


THE WHITE LIGHT AGAIN 

D ICKY was considerably subdued. India had 
permitted his ideas to romp at large. He had 
forgotten that, home again, these ideas must 
be brought down to an orderly trudge. America, as a 
whole, seemed one-pointedly trying to get back to work 
after the War, calling all protestors untimely and in 
bad taste. Dicky thought out the situation minutely 
and severely during the three full travel days to Chi¬ 
cago. At the end of each day he was somewhat ex¬ 
hausted from the big bonfires that had taken place 
within him—piles of rubbish, glamour and the like. 

In Chicago he procured two numbers of The Public 
Square preceding the current issue, and before his eyes 
was the manner in which Pidge had “sprung” the 
Amritsar story. He felt the magic of her working 
with him in an altogether new way. The latest number 
confessed, not without grace, that the story of Gandhi 
and Amritsar had aroused the more open-minded ele¬ 
ment of the American public, as nothing else since the 
War; but thanks to Chris Heidt, the returning corre¬ 
spondent watched the rising tide of public interest in 
his work, as a spectator unexpectant, instead of a per¬ 
former who fancies he has the world by the tail. It 
dawned on him, however, that Chris Heidt hadn’t 
315 


THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


known quite all that was going on in America under 
the homely thunders of trade. 

He reached New York in the early evening and Went 
to Fiftieth Street at once. There he had dinner, and 
an hour of talk, before he rang up Mrs. Melton at the 
Sennacherib. 

“Is this Mr. Cobden?” a voice asked presently. 

“Yes.” 

“Mrs. Melton left word for you to go to 54 Harrow 
Street—to the parlor on the second floor, the card 
says.” 

Mr. Cobden didn’t take out his own car that night. 
Perhaps he didn’t feel as if he could keep his mind on 
getting himself downtown. He sat back in the cush¬ 
ions of his mother’s limousine; and Conrad, whose 
career as Cobden coachman had changed to Cobden 
chauffeur nearly twenty years ago, handled the big box 
like a hearse. 

“Sit tight, Dicky,” he breathed, and never once urged 
Conrad forward. In fact, Dicky didn’t speak, until it 
became necessary to show the way a little, for Harrow 
Street is tricky to find from Washington Square. 

“Don’t wait—yes, you’d better wait, Conrad,” he 
called, crossing the walk to the door. 

The outer door was unlatched. He hurried up one 
flight. The same curtain, the white light. 

“Pidge-” 

She came forth from the inner room. She halted a 
few feet from him, and he saw her searching, im¬ 
ploring look. His shoulders straightened, his hands 
316 



THE WHITE LIGHT AGAIN 


dropped to his side. The finer elements of his under¬ 
standing sensed the great need of a woman, which his 
brain did not actually register. To answer her need 
in action, however, was instantly more dominant within 
him than his thirst for herself. 

She came a step nearer. Light was filling her eyes— 
the shining of an almost incredible hope. 

“Oh, Dicky, you can! I believe you can!” 

“Yes?” 

She was nearer. 

“And I can come and rest—a little?” 

“Yes, Pidge-” 

“I want to rest so badly, you know.” 

She had come to him under the light. 

. . And, oh, since I knew you were coming, every¬ 
thing has been different. I haven’t been me at all! 
I’ve never played—and now everything—all work—is 
silly, unimportant. Dicky, everything seems to be 
done!” 

“I’m on the job, Pidge; you can play-” 

“Until I find myself—you—you will stand for two?” 

“Of course, Pidge.” 

“All my things, your things, Dicky—so I can rush 
away and breathe?” 

“That’s what I’m here for.” 

“Rufe Melton and my father and the desk—all 
yours ?” 

“And the baby, too, Pidge.” 

“Dicky—Dicky—don’t dare to look! I’m going to 
cry!” 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


. . Since your telegram from San Francisco—it 
seemed I could hardly stay alive! Oh, it’s so good to 
rest!” 

“Not a hurry in the world!” 

“Everything seemed done—and no place for me! 
. . . Rufe and a rich girl uptown—oh, they’re in full 
blossom and he wants to be free! My father caught 
on in New York—no need now for me. The Public 
Square on the high road at last; your Amritsar story 
capturing the whole field; nothing to do but to feed the 
presses more and more; Miss Claes gone, and the 
Legacy—oh, Dicky, I saw your hand back of that! I 
couldn’t miss it. It touched me—touched me-” 

“It was his idea first, Pidge. All I had to do was to 
help him carry it out.” 

“All happened at once—all the strains lifted—no one 
depending—no one needing me! . . . I’ve been dying 
to be a woman just once. I’ve never dared—never had 
time. It’s so terrible to feel like a woman and not be 
able-” 

“Why not now, Pidge ?” 

“Don’t think, Dicky! I’m just resting a little. We 
must work together a lot. We must clear our heads 
with stacks of work—and then maybe we’ll know if 
we can play. . . . Fanny Gallup did that for me, and 
Rufe Melton is as much a baby as his infant. Other 
girl, or not—Rufe will always need—us!” 

“Pidge, listen! I couldn’t stand any more than that 
now. To have you say that— us! To have the work 
with you—to have earned that—to have your faith; 

318 






THE WHITE LIGHT AGAIN 


that you dare come this close—to have years to make 
the big moments we have known apart, come true to¬ 
gether—I couldn’t stand more, right now; that’s the 
fact of it—quite!” 

She stepped back from him looking strangely into 
his face again. 

“Dicky!” 

“Yes?” 

“The boy has come back to your face—that you lost 
in Africa—but the new and lasting Boy!” 

He laughed and looked around the room. It was 
furnished, but barely, the “parlor” having reverted to 
a sleeping room. 

“But how did it happen—that we should come here, 
Pidge?” 

“I couldn’t let you come to Gramercy Park. I re¬ 
membered that you waited to see me here after Africa, 
not at the office. I came down this way—the afternoon 
of the Legacy and saw the sign, ‘Rooms, Permanent 
and Transient.’ . . . I’m better now. It’s been hours, 
hasn’t it?” 

He thought of Conrad, whom he had told to wait. 

“. . . This room’s all paid for,” she whispered. “I 
mean we don’t have to stop to speak to anybody—only 
walk out.” 

Their eyes held. 

“Dicky!” 

“Yes-” 

“Let’s go—now.” 

“I’m—I’m ready.” 


319 





THE PUBLIC SQUARE 


“Dear Dicky, the years have done so much for you! 
The blur, the maze has gone out from between us. 
It’s so much more wonderful, isn’t it, than that other 
night here, when I almost, almost-?” 

He waited for her to reach the hall curtains, before 
he turned off the light. In the dimness of the hall, he 
heard her low, slow tone: 

“Fanny’s room was back—at the far end on this 
floor-” 

. I remember once, Pidge, I went up the next 
flight and knocked at the door of your little back 
room-” 

“That’s gone now,” she answered. 

“Gone?” 

“My two books that were written there—and all the 
rest! I can tell you everything now—and of the book 
that is still to be written—our story, Dicky.” 

“A continued story,” he said. 

They went down into the street, into the car. 


( 1 ) 


THE END 






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